THE MOUNTAINS 



BY 



STEWART EDWARD WHITE 

AUTHOR OF 
"the BLAZED TRAIL," "silent PLACES," 

"the forest," etc. 



ILLUSTRATED BX FERNAND LUNGREN 




NEW YORK 
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & COMPANY 

1904 



OCT 550 1904 

x Owwf ttrt Ertrv 

L^t *eJ4*d 

CLASS # )jXof NoT 



3*4 






■*- 



Copyright, 1904, i;y 

McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 

Published October, 1904 



Copyright, 1904, by The Outlook Company 






PREFACE 

I'ke author has followed a true sequence of events 
practically in all particulars save in respect to the 
character of the tenderfoot. He is in one sense fictitious ; 
in another sense real. He is real in that he is the 
apotheosis of many tenderfeet, and that everything he does 
in this narrative he has done at one time or another in the 
author's experience. He is fictitious in the sense that he 
is in no way to he identified with the third member of our 
party in the actual trip. 





CONTENTS 










PAGE 


I. 


The Ridge Trail 




3 


II. 


On Equipment .... 






9 


III. 


On Horses 






21 


IV. 


How To Go About It . 






43 


V. 


The Coast Ranges 






57 


VI. 


The Inferno 






7* 


VII. 


The Foot-Hills .... 






81 


VIII. 


The Pines 






87 


IX. 


The Trail 






97 


X. 


On Seeing Deer .... 






116 


XI. 


On Tenderfeet .... 






129 


XII. 


The Canon 








XIII. 


Trout, Buckskin, and Prospector 


s 




157 


XIV. 


On Camp Cookery 






175 


XV. 


On the Wind at Night 






191 


XVI. 


The Valley .... 






197 


XVII. 


The Main Crest . 






211 


XVIII. 


The Giant Forest 






225 


XIX. 


On Cowboys .... 






• 233 


XX. 


The Golden Trout 






• 253 


XXI. 


On Going Out 






261 


XXII. 


The Lure of the Trail 






. 277 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



The Mountains 



Frontispiece 



/ 



FACING 
PAGE 



Like thrusting your shoulders out of a hatchway, you 

looked over the top . ...... 4 

Your grub supply ........ 20 

The spirit of malevolent mischief was hers . ... 36 

Out from beneath us crept the plain .... 68 

We journeyed over the alkali at noon ..... 74 

The flicker of a fire threw a glow out into the dark . 78 

On these slopes played the wind . ..... 92 

The trail to the canon-bed was generally dangerous . 102 ' 
Six times a minute we held our breaths . . . .152 

Towards evening he sauntered in . ... 166 

Camp cookery ......... 182 

We walked to the edge of the main crest and looked 

over ......... 220 

At every stride we stepped ten feet and slid five . . . 222 

The Sequoia . . . not monstrous, but beautiful . 228 
Figures suddenly emerging from mystery into the clarity 

of firelight 250 



THE RIDGE TRAIL 




Like thrusting your shoulders out of a hatchway, you looked 
over the top 



THE MOUNTAINS 

I 
THE RIDGE TRAIL 

SIX trails lead to the main ridge. They are all 
good trails, so that even the casual tourist in the 
little Spanish-American town on the seacoast need 
have nothing to fear from the ascent. In some spots 
they contract to an arm's length of space, outside of 
which limit they drop sheer away; elsewhere they 
stand up on end, zigzag in lacets each more hair- 
raising than the last, or fill to demoralization with 
loose boulders and shale. A fall on the part of your 
horse would mean a more than serious accident; but 
Western horses do not fall. The major premise stands : 
even the casual tourist has no real reason for fear, 
however scared he may become. 

Our favorite route to the main ridge was by a way 
called the Cold Spring Trail. We used to enjoy 
taking visitors up it, mainly because you come on 
the top suddenly, without warning. Then we col- 
lected remarks. Everybody, even the most stolid, 
said something. 

You rode three miles on the flat, two in the leafy 
and gradually ascending creek-bed of a canon, a half 

3 



THE MOUNTAINS 

hour of laboring steepness in the overarching moun- 
tain lilac and laurel. There you came to a great rock 
gateway which seemed the top of the world. At the 
gateway was a Bad Place where the ponies planted 
warily their little hoofs, and the visitor played " eyes 
front," and besought that his mount should not 
stumble. 

Beyond the gateway a lush level canon into which 
you plunged as into a bath ; then again the laboring 
trail, up and always up toward the blue California 
sky, out of the lilacs, and laurels, and redwood chap- 
arral into the manzanita, the Spanish bayonet, the 
creamy yucca, and the fine angular shale of the 
upper regions. Beyond the apparent summit you 
found always other summits yet to be climbed. And 
all at once, like thrusting your shoulders out of a 
hatchway, you looked over the top. 

Then came the remarks. Some swore softly ; some 
uttered appreciative ejaculation ; some shouted aloud ; 
some gasped ; one man uttered three times the word 
" Oh," — once breathlessly, Oh ! once in awakening 
appreciation, Oh ! once in wild enthusiasm, Oh ! 
Then invariably they fell silent and looked. 

For the ridge, ascending from seaward in a gradual 
coquetry of foot-hills, broad low ranges, cross-sys- 
tems, canons, little flats, and gentle ravines, inland 
dropped off almost sheer to the river below. And 
from under your very feet rose, range after range, tier 
after tier, rank after rank, in increasing crescendo of 

4 



THE RIDGE TRAIL 

wonderful tinted mountains to the main crest of the 
Coast Ranges, the blue distance, the mightiness of 
California's western systems. The eye followed them 
up and up, and farther and farther, with the accumu- 
lating emotion of a wild rush on a toboggan. There 
came a point where the fact grew to be almost too 
big for the appreciation, just as beyond a certain 
point speed seems to become unbearable. It left you 
breathless, wonder-stricken, awed. You could do 
nothing but look, and look, and look again, tongue- 
tied by the impossibility of doing justice to what you 
felt. And in the far distance, finally, your soul, grown 
big in a moment, came to rest on the great precipices 
and pines of the greatest mountains of all, close under 
the sky. 

In a little, after the change had come to you, a 
change definite and enduring, which left your inner 
processes forever different from what they had been, 
you turned sharp to the west and rode five miles 
along the knife-edge Ridge Trail to where Rattle- 
snake Canon led you down and back to your accus- 
tomed environment. 

To the left as you rode you saw, far on the hori- 
zon, rising to the height of your eye, the mountains 
of the channel islands. Then the deep sapphire of 
the Pacific, fringed with the soft, unchanging white 
of the surf and the yellow of the shore. Then the 
town like a little map, and the lush greens of the 
wide meadows, the fruit-groves, the lesser ranges — 

5 



THE MOUNTAINS 

all vivid, fertile, brilliant, and pulsating with vitality. 
You filled your senses with it, steeped them in the 
beauty of it. And at once, by a mere turn of the 
eyes, from the almost crude insistence of the bright 
primary color of life, you faced the tenuous azures 
of distance, the delicate mauves and amethysts, the 
lilacs and saffrons of the arid country. 

This was the wonder we never tired of seeing for 
ourselves, of showing to others. And often, aca- 
demically, perhaps a little wistfully, as one talks of 
something to be dreamed of but never enjoyed, we 
spoke of how fine it would be to ride down into that 
land of mystery and enchantment, to penetrate one 
after another the canons dimly outlined in the shad- 
ows cast by the westering sun, to cross the mountains 
lying outspread in easy grasp of the eye, to gain the 
distant blue Ridge, and see with our own eyes what 
lay beyond. 

For to its other attractions the prospect added that 
of impossibility, of unattainableness. These rides of 
ours were day rides. We had to get home by night- 
fall. Our horses had to be fed, ourselves to be housed. 
We had not time to continue on down the other side 
whither the trail led. At the very and literal brink 
of achievement we were forced to turn back. 

Gradually the idea possessed us. We promised 
ourselves that some day we would explore. In our 
after-dinner smokes we spoke of it. Occasionally, 
from some hunter or forest-ranger, we gained little 

6 



THE RIDGE TRAIL 

items of information, we learned the fascination of 
musical names — Mono Canon, Patrera Don Victor, 
Lloma Paloma, Patrera Madulce, Cuyamas, became 
familiar to us as syllables. We desired mightily to 
body them forth to ourselves as facts. The extent 
of our mental vision expanded. We heard of other 
mountains far beyond these farthest — mountains 
whose almost unexplored vastnesses contained great 
forests, mighty valleys, strong water-courses, beauti- 
ful hanging-meadows, deep canons of granite, eternal 
snows, — mountains so extended, so wonderful, that 
their secrets offered whole summers of solitary ex- 
ploration. We came to feel their marvel, we came 
to respect the inferno of the Desert that hemmed 
them in. Shortly we graduated from the indefinite- 
ness of railroad maps to the intricacies of geological 
survey charts. The fever was on us. We must go. 
A dozen of us desired. Three of us went ; and 
of the manner of our going, and what you must 
know who would do likewise, I shall try here to 
tell. 



ON EQUIPMENT 



II 

ON EQUIPMENT 

IF you would travel far in the great mountains 
where the trails are few and bad, you will need 
a certain unique experience and skill. Before you 
dare venture forth without a guide, you must be able 
to do a number of things, and to do them well. 

First and foremost of all, you must be possessed 
of that strange sixth sense best described as the sense 
of direction. By it you always know about where 
you are. It is to some degree a memory for back- 
tracks and landmarks, but to a greater extent an 
instinct for the lay of the country, for relative bear- 
ings, by which you are able to make your way 
across-lots back to your starting-place. It is not an 
uncommon faculty, yet some lack it utterly. If you 
are one of the latter class, do not venture, for you 
will get lost as sure as shooting, and being lost in 
the mountains is no joke. 

Some men possess it ; others do not. The distinc- 
tion seems to be almost arbitrary. It can be largely 
developed, but only in those with whom original 
endowment of the faculty makes development pos- 
sible. No matter how long a direction-blind man 
frequents the wilderness, he is never sure of himself. 



THE MOUNTAINS 

Nor is the lack any reflection on the intelligence. I 
once traveled in the Black Hills with a young fel- 
low who himself frankly confessed that after much 
experiment he had come to the conclusion he could 
not " find himself." He asked me to keep near him, 
and this I did as well as I could; but even then, 
three times during the course of ten days he lost 
himself completely in the tumultuous upheavals and 
canons of that badly mixed region. Another, an old 
grouse-hunter, walked twice in a circle within the 
confines of a thick swamp about two miles square. 
On the other hand, many exhibit almost marvelous 
skill in striking a bee-line for their objective point, 
and can always tell you, even after an engrossing and 
wandering hunt, exactly where camp lies. And I 
know nothing more discouraging than to look up 
after a long hard day to find your landmarks changed 
in appearance, your choice widened to at least five 
diverging and similar canons, your pockets empty 
of food, and the chill mountain twilight descend- 
ing. 

Analogous to this is the ability to follow a dim 
trail. A trail in the mountains often means merely a 
way through, a route picked out by some prospector, 
and followed since at long intervals by chance trav- 
elers. 

It may, moreover, mean the only way through. 
Missing it will bring you to ever-narrowing ledges, 
until at last you end at a precipice, and there is no 

12 



ON EQUIPMENT 

room to turn your horses around for the return. Some 
of the great box canons thousands of feet deep are 
practicable by but one passage, — and that steep and 
ingenious in its utilization of ledges, crevices, little 
ravines, and " hog's-backs " ; and when the only in- 
dications to follow consist of the dim vestiges left by 
your last predecessor, perhaps years before, the affair 
becomes one of considerable skill and experience. 
You must be able to pick out scratches made by 
shod hoofs on the granite, depressions almost filled 
in by the subsequent fall of decayed vegetation, ex- 
coriations on fallen trees. You must have the sense 
to know at once when you have overrun these indica- 
tions, and the patience to turn back immediately to 
your last certainty, there to pick up the next clue, 
even if it should take you the rest of the day. In 
short, it is absolutely necessary that you be at least 
a persistent tracker. 

Parenthetically ; having found the trail, be charit- 
able. Blaze it, if there are trees ; otherwise " monu- 
ment " it by piling rocks on top of one another. 
Thus will those who come after bless your unknown 
shade. 

Third, you must know horses. I do not mean that 
you should be a horse-show man, with a knowledge 
of points and pedigrees. But you must learn exactly 
what they can and cannot do in the matters of carry- 
ing weights, making distance, enduring without de- 
terioration hard climbs in high altitudes ; what they 

13 



THE MOUNTAINS 

can or cannot get over in the way of bad places. 
This last is not always a matter of appearance merely. 
Some bits of trail, seeming impassable to anything 
but a goat, a Western horse will negotiate easily ; 
while others, not particularly terrifying in appear- 
ance, offer complications of abrupt turn or a single 
bit of unstable, leg-breaking footing which renders 
them exceedingly dangerous. You must, moreover, 
be able to manage your animals to the best advan- 
tage in such bad places. Of course you must in the 
beginning have been wise as to the selection of the 
horses. 

Fourth, you must know good horse-feed when 
you see it. Your animals are depending entirely on 
the country ; for of course you are carrying no dry 
feed for them. Their pasturage will present itself 
under a variety of aspects, all of which you must re- 
cognize with certainty. Some of the greenest, lush- 
est, most satisfy ing-looking meadows grow nothing 
but water-grasses of large bulk but small nutrition ; 
while apparently barren tracts often conceal small but 
strong growths of great value. You must differen- 
tiate these. 

Fifth, you must possess the ability to pare a hoof, 
fit a shoe cold, nail it in place. A bare hoof does not 
last long on the granite, and you are far from the 
nearest blacksmith. Directly in line with this, you 
must have the trick of picking up and holding a 
hoof without being kicked, and you must be able to 

14 



ON EQUIPMENT 

throw and tie without injuring him any horse that 
declines to be shod in any other way. 

Last, you must of course be able to pack a horse 
well, and must know four or five of the most essen- 
tial pack-" hitches." 

With this personal equipment you ought to be 
able to get through the country. It comprises the 
absolutely essential. 

But further, for the sake of the highest efficiency, 
you should add, as finish to your mountaineer's 
education, certain other items. A knowledge of the 
habits of deer and the ability to catch trout with fair 
certainty are almost a necessity when far from the base 
of supplies. Occasionally the trail goes to pieces en- 
tirely : there you must know something of the hand- 
ling of an axe and pick. Learn how to swim a 
horse. You will have to take lessons in camp-fire 
cookery. Otherwise employ a guide. Of course 
your lungs, heart, and legs must be in good condi- 
tion. 

As to outfit, certain especial conditions will differ- 
entiate your needs from those of forest and canoe 
travel. 

You will in the changing altitudes be exposed to 
greater variations in temperature. At morning you 
may travel in the hot arid foot-hills ; at noon you will 
be in the cool shades of the big pines ; towards 
evening you may wallow through snowdrifts ; and at 
dark you may camp where morning will show you 

is 



THE MOUNTAINS 

icicles hanging from the brinks of little waterfalls. 
Behind your saddle you will want to carry a sweater, 
or better still a buckskin waistcoat. Your arms are 
never cold anyway, and the pockets of such a waist- 
coat, made many and deep, are handy receptacles for 
smokables, matches, cartridges, and the like. For the 
night-time, when the cold creeps down from the high 
peaks, you should provide yourself with a suit of 
very heavy underwear and an extra sweater or a 
buckskin shirt. The latter is lighter, softer, and more 
impervious to the wind than the sweater. Here 
again I wish to place myself on record as opposed to 
a coat. It is a useless ornament, assumed but rarely, 
and then only as substitute for a handier garment. 

Inasmuch as you will be a great deal called on to 
handle abrading and sometimes frozen ropes, you 
will want a pair of heavy buckskin gauntlets. An 
extra pair of stout high-laced boots with small Hun- 
garian hob-nails will come handy. It is marvelous 
how quickly leather wears out in the downhill fric- 
tion of granite and shale. I once found the heels of 
a new pair of shoes almost ground away by a single 
giant-strides descent of a steep shale-covered thirteen- 
thousand-foot mountain. Having no others I patched 
them with hair-covered rawhide and a bit of horse- 
shoe. It sufficed, but was a long and disagreeable 
job which an extra pair would have obviated. 

Balsam is practically unknown in the high hills, 
and the rocks are especially hard. Therefore you will 

16 



ON EQUIPMENT 

take, in addition to your gray army-blanket, a thick 
quilt or comforter to save your bones. This, with 
your saddle-blankets and pads as foundation, should 
give you ease — if you are tough. Otherwise take a 
second quilt. 

A tarpaulin of heavy canvas 17x6 feet goes under 
you, and can be, if necessary, drawn up to cover your 
head. We never used a tent. Since you do not have 
to pack your outfit on your own back, you can, if you 
choose, include a small pillow. Your other personal 
belongings are those you would carry into the Forest. 
I have elsewhere described what they should be. 

Now as to the equipment for your horses. 

The most important point for yourself is your rid- 
ing-saddle. The cowboy or military style and seat are 
the only practicable ones. Perhaps of these two the 
cowboy saddle is the better, for the simple reason that 
often in roping or leading a refractory horse, the horn 
is a great help. For steep-trail work the double cinch 
is preferable to the single, as it need not be pulled so 
tight to hold the saddle in place. 

Your riding-bridle you will make of an ordinary 
halter by riveting two snaps to the lower part of the 
head-piece just above the corners of the horse's mouth. 
These are snapped into the rings of the bit. At night 
you unsnap the bit, remove it and the reins, and leave 
the halter part on the horse. Each animal, riding and 
packing, has furthermore a short lead-rope attached 
always to his halter-ring. 

17 



THE MOUNTAINS 

Of pack-saddles the ordinary sawbuck tree is by all 
odds the best, provided it fits. It rarely does. If you 
can adjust the wood accurately to the anatomy of the 
individual horse, so that the side pieces bear evenly 
and smoothly without gouging the withers or chafing 
the back, you are possessed of the handiest machine 
made for the purpose. Should individual fitting prove 
impracticable, get an old low California riding-tree 
and have a blacksmith bolt an upright spike on the 
cantle. You can hang the loops of the kyacks or 
alforjas — the sacks slung on either side the horse 
— from the pommel and this iron spike. Whatever 
the saddle chosen, it should be supplied with breast- 
straps, breeching, and two good cinches. 

The kyacks or alforjas just mentioned are made 
either of heavy canvas, or of rawhide shaped square 
and dried over boxes. After drying, the boxes are 
removed, leaving the stiff rawhide like small trunks 
open at the top. I prefer the canvas, for the reason 
that they can be folded and packed for railroad trans- 
portation. If a stifFer receptacle is wanted for miscel- 
laneous loose small articles, you can insert a soap-box 
inside the canvas. It cannot be denied that the raw- 
hide will stand rougher usage. 

Probably the point now of greatest importance is 
that of saddle-padding. A sore back is the easiest 
thing in the world to induce, — three hours' chafing 
will turn the trick, — and once it is done you are in 
trouble for a month. No precautions or pains are too 

18 



ON EQUIPMENT 

great to take in assuring your pack-animals against 
this. On a pinch you will give up cheerfully part 
of your bedding to the cause. However, two good- 
quality woolen blankets properly and smoothly 
folded, a pad made of two ordinary collar-pads sewed 
parallel by means of canvas strips in such a manner 
as to lie along both sides of the backbone, a well-fitted 
saddle, and care in packing will nearly always suffice. 
I have gone months without having to doctor a single 
abrasion. 

You will furthermore want a pack-cinch and a 
pack-rope for each horse. The former are of canvas 
or webbing provided with a ring at one end and a 
big bolted wooden hook at the other. The latter 
should be half-inch lines of good quality. Thirty-three 
feet is enough for packing only; but we usually 
bought them forty feet long, so they could be used 
also as picket-ropes. Do not fail to include several 
extra. They are always fraying out, getting broken, 
being cut to free a fallen horse, or becoming lost. 

Besides the picket-ropes, you will also provide for 
each horse a pair of strong hobbles. Take them to 
a harness-maker and have him sew inside each ankle- 
band a broad strip of soft wash-leather twice the width 
of the band. This will save much chafing. Some advo- 
cate sheepskin with the wool on, but this I have found 
tends to soak up water or to freeze hard. At least 
two loud cow-bells with neck-straps are handy to 
assist you in locating whither the bunch may have 

19 



THE MOUNTAINS 

strayed during the night. They should be hung on 
the loose horses most inclined to wander. 

Accidents are common in the hills. The repair-kit 
is normally rather comprehensive. Buy a number of 
extra latigos, or cinch-straps. Include many copper 
rivets of all sizes — they are the best quick-repair 
known for almost everything, from putting together 
a smashed pack-saddle to cobbling a worn-out boot. 
Your horseshoeing outfit should be complete with 
paring-knife, rasp, nail-set, clippers, hammer, nails, 
and shoes. The latter will be the malleable soft iron, 
low-calked " Goodenough," which can be fitted cold. 
Purchase a dozen front shoes and a dozen and a half 
hind shoes. The latter wear out faster on the trail. 
A box or so of hob-nails for your own boots, a waxed 
end and awl, a whetstone, a file, and a piece of buck- 
skin for strings and patches complete the list. 

Thus equipped, with your grub supply, your cook- 
ing-utensils, your personal effects, your rifle and your 
fishing-tackle, you should be able to go anywhere 
that man and horses can go, entirely self-reliant, 
independent of the towns. 



20 




Your grub supply 



ON HORSES 



Ill 

ON HORSES 

I REALLY believe that you will find more va- 
riation of individual and interesting character 
in a given number of Western horses than in an 
equal number of the average men one meets on the 
street. Their whole education, from the time they 
run loose on the range until the time when, branded, 
corralled, broken, and saddled, they pick their way 
under guidance over a bad piece of trail, tends to 
develop their self-reliance. They learn to think for 
themselves. 

To begin with two misconceptions, merely by way 
of clearing the ground: the Western horse is gen- 
erally designated as a "bronco." The term is consid- 
ered synonymous of horse or pony. This is not so. 
A horse is " bronco " when he is ugly or mean or 
vicious or unbroken. So is a cow " bronco " in the 
same condition, or a mule, or a burro. Again, from 
certain Western illustrators and from a few samples, 
our notion of the cow-pony has become that of a lean, 
rangy, wiry, thin-necked, scrawny beast. Such may 
be found. But the average good cow-pony is apt 
to be an exceedingly handsome animal, clean-built, 
graceful. This is natural, when you stop to think of 

23 



THE MOUNTAINS 

it, for he is descended direct from Moorish and Ara- 
bian stock. 

Certain characteristics he possesses beyond the 
capabilities of the ordinary horse. The most marvel- 
ous to me of these is his sure-footedness. Let me give 
you a few examples. 

I once was engaged with a crew of cowboys in round- 
ing up mustangs in southern Arizona. We would 
ride slowly in through the hills until we caught sight 
of the herds. Then it was a case of running them 
down and heading them off, of turning the herd, 
milling it, of rushing it while confused across country 
and into the big corrals. The surface of the ground 
was composed of angular volcanic rocks about the 
size of your two fists, between which the bunch-grass 
sprouted. An Eastern rider would ride his horse very 
gingerly and at a walk, and then thank his lucky 
stars if he escaped stumbles. The cowboys turned 
their mounts through at a dead run. It was beautiful 
to see the ponies go, lifting their feet well up and 
over, planting them surely and firmly, and neverthe- 
less making speed and attending to the game. Once, 
when we had pushed the herd up the slope of a 
butte, it made a break to get through a little hog- 
back. The only way to head it was down a series of 
rough boulder ledges laid over a great sheet of vol- 
canic rock. The man at the hog-back put his little 
gray over the ledges and boulders, down the sheet of 
rock, — hop, slip, slide, — and along the side hill in 

24 



ON HORSES 

time to head off the first of the mustangs. During the 
ten days of riding I saw no horse fall. The animal 
I rode, Button by name, never even stumbled. 

In the Black Hills years ago I happened to be one 
of the inmates of a small mining-camp. Each night 
the work-animals, after being fed, were turned loose 
in the mountains. As I possessed the only cow-pony 
in the outfit, he was fed in the corral, and kept up 
for the purpose of rounding up the others. Every 
morning one of us used to ride him out after the 
herd. Often it was necessary to run him at full speed 
along the mountain-side, over rocks, boulders, and 
ledges, across ravines and gullies. Never but once in 
three months did he fall. 

On the trail, too, they will perform feats little short 
of marvelous. Mere steepness does not bother them 
at all. They sit back almost on their haunches, bunch 
their feet together, and slide. I have seen them go 
down a hundred feet this way. In rough country 
they place their feet accurately and quickly, gauge 
exactly the proper balance. I have led my saddle- 
horse, Bullet, over country where, undoubtedly to 
his intense disgust, I myself have fallen a dozen times 
in the course of a morning. Bullet had no such trou- 
bles. Any of the mountain horses will hop cheerfully 
up or down ledges anywhere. They will even walk 
a log fifteen or twenty feet above a stream. I have 
seen the same trick performed in Barnum's circus as 
a wonderful feat, accompanied by brass bands and 

25 



THE MOUNTAINS 

breathlessness. We accomplished it on our trip with- 
out any brass bands ; I cannot answer for the breath- 
lessness. As for steadiness of nerve, they will walk 
serenely on the edge of precipices a man would hate 
to look over, and given a palm's breadth for the soles 
of their feet, they will get through. Over such a place 
I should a lot rather trust Bullet than myself. 

In an emergency the Western horse is not apt to 
lose his head. When a pack-horse falls down, he lies 
still without struggle until eased of his pack and told 
to get up. If he slips off an edge, he tries to double 
his fore legs under him and slide. Should he find 
himself in a tight place, he waits patiently for you to 
help him, and then proceeds gingerly. A friend of 
mine rode a horse named Blue. One day, the trail 
being slippery with rain, he slid and fell. My friend 
managed a successful jump, but Blue tumbled about 
thirty feet to the bed of the canon. Fortunately he 
was not injured. After some difficulty my friend 
managed to force his way through the chaparral to 
where Blue stood. Then it was fine to see them. 
My friend would go ahead a few feet, picking a route. 
When he had made his decision, he called Blue. Blue 
came that far, and no farther. Several times the little 
horse balanced painfully and unsteadily like a goat, 
all four feet on a boulder, waiting for his signal to 
advance. In this manner they regained the trail, and 
proceeded as though nothing had happened. In- 
stances could be multiplied indefinitely. 

26 



ON HORSES 

A good animal adapts himself quickly. He is 
capable of learning by experience. In a country en- 
tirely new to him he soon discovers the best method 
of getting about, where the feed grows, where he can 
find water. He is accustomed to foraging for him- 
self. You do not need to show him his pasturage. 
If there is anything to eat anywhere in the district he 
will find it. Little tufts of bunch-grass growing con- 
cealed under the edges of the brush, he will search out. 
If he cannot get grass, he knows how to rustle for the 
browse of small bushes. Bullet would devour sage- 
brush, when he could get nothing else ; and I have 
even known him philosophically to fill up on dry 
pine-needles. There is no nutrition in dry pine-nee- 
dles, but Bullet got a satisfyingly full belly. On the 
trail a well-seasoned horse will be always on the forage, 
snatching here a mouthful, yonder a single spear of 
grass, and all without breaking the regularity of his 
gait, or delaying the pack-train behind him. At the 
end of the day's travel he is that much to the good. 

By long observation thus you will construct your 
ideal of the mountain horse, and in your selection 
of your animals for an expedition you will search 
always for that ideal. It is only too apt to be modi- 
fied by personal idiosyncrasies, and proverbially an 
ideal is difficult of attainment; but you will, with 
care, come closer to its realization than one accus- 
tomed only to the conventionality of an artificially 
reared horse would believe possible. 

27 



THE MOUNTAINS 

The ideal mountain horse, when you come to pick 
him out, is of medium size. He should be not 
smaller than fourteen hands nor larger than fifteen. 
He is strongly but not clumsily built, short-coupled, 
with none of the snipy speedy range of the valley 
animal. You will select preferably one of wide full 
forehead, indicating intelligence, low in the withers, 
so the saddle will not be apt to gall him. His sure- 
ness of foot should be beyond question, and of course 
he must be an expert at foraging. A horse that knows 
but one or two kinds of feed, and that starves unless 
he can find just those kinds, is an abomination. He 
must not jump when you throw all kinds of rattling 
and terrifying tarpaulins across him, and he must not 
mind if the pack-ropes fall about his heels. In the 
day's march he must follow like a dog without the 
necessity of a lead-rope, nor must he stray far when 
turned loose at night. 

Fortunately, when removed from the reassuring 
environment of civilization, horses are gregarious. 
They hate to be separated from the bunch to which 
they are accustomed. Occasionally one of us would 
stop on the trail, for some reason or another, thus 
dropping behind the pack-train. Instantly the saddle- 
horse so detained would begin to grow uneasy. Bul- 
let used by all means in his power to try to induce me 
to proceed. He would nibble me with his lips, paw 
the ground, dance in a circle, and finally sidle up to 
me in the position of being mounted, than which he 

28 



ON HORSES 

could think of no stronger hint. Then when I had 
finally remounted, it was hard to hold him in. He 
would whinny frantically, scramble with enthusiasm 
up trails steep enough to draw a protest at ordinary 
times, and rejoin his companions with every symptom 
of gratification and delight. This gregariousness and 
alarm at being left alone in a strange country tends to 
hold them together at night. You are reasonably cer- 
tain that in the morning, having found one, you will 
come upon the rest not far away. 

The personnel of our own outfit we found most 
interesting. Although collected from divergent local- 
ities they soon became acquainted. In a crowded 
corral they were always compact in their organization, 
sticking close together, and resisting as a solid phalanx 
encroachments on their feed by other and stranger 
horses. Their internal organization was very amusing. 
A certain segregation soon took place. Some became 
leaders ; others by common consent were relegated to 
the position of subordinates. 

The order of precedence on the trail was rigidly 
preserved by the pack-horses. An attempt by Buck- 
shot to pass Dinkey, for example, the latter always 
met with a bite or a kick by way of hint. If the 
gelding still persisted, and tried to pass by a long 
detour, the mare would rush out at him angrily, her 
ears back, her eyes flashing, her neck extended. And 
since Buckshot was by no means inclined always to 
give in meekly, we had opportunities for plenty 

29 



THE MOUNTAINS 

of amusement. The two were always skirmishing. 
When by a strategic short cut across the angle of 
a trail Buckshot succeeded in stealing a march on 
Dinkey, while she was nipping a mouthful, his tri- 
umph was beautiful to see. He never held the place 
for long, however. Dinkey's was the leadership by 
force of ambition and energetic character, and at the 
head of the pack-train she normally marched. 

Yet there were hours when utter indifference 
seemed to fall on the militant spirits. They trailed 
peacefully and amiably in the rear while Lily or Jenny 
marched with pride in the coveted advance. But the 
place was theirs only by sufferance. A bite or a kick 
sent them back to their own positions when the true 
leaders grew tired of their vacation. 

However rigid this order of precedence, the saddle- 
animals were acknowledged as privileged ; — and 
knew it. They could go where they pleased. Fur- 
thermore theirs was the duty of correcting infractions 
of the trail discipline, such as grazing on the march, 
or attempting unauthorized short cuts. They appre- 
ciated this duty. Bullet always became vastly indig- 
nant if one of the pack-horses misbehaved. He would 
run at the offender angrily, hustle him to his place with 
savage nips of his teeth, and drop back to his own 
position with a comical air of virtue. Once in a great 
while it would happen that on my spurring up from 
the rear of the column I would be mistaken for one 
of the pack-horses attempting illegally to get ahead. 

3° 



ON HORSES 

Immediately Dinkey or Buckshot would snake his 
head out crossly to turn me to the rear. It was really 
ridiculous to see the expression of apology with which 
they would take it all back, and the ostentatious, 
nose-elevated indifference in Bullet's very gait as he 
marched haughtily by. So rigid did all the animals 
hold this convention that actually in the San Joaquin 
Valley Dinkey once attempted to head off a South- 
ern Pacific train. She ran at full speed diagonally 
toward it, her eyes striking fire, her ears back, her 
teeth snapping in rage because the locomotive would 
not keep its place behind her ladyship. 

Let me make you acquainted with our outfit. 

I rode, as you have gathered, an Arizona pony 
named Bullet. He was a handsome fellow with a 
chestnut brown coat, long mane and tail, and a beau- 
tiful pair of brown eyes. Wes always called him 
" Baby." He was in fact the youngster of the party, 
with all the engaging qualities of youth. I never saw 
a horse more willing. He wanted to do what you 
wanted him to ; it pleased him, and gave him a 
warm consciousness of virtue which the least observ- 
ant could not fail to remark. When leading he 
walked industriously ahead, setting the pace ; when 
driving, — that is, closing up the rear, — he attended 
strictly to business. Not for the most luscious bunch 
of grass that ever grew would he pause even for an 
instant. Yet in his off hours, when I rode irrespon- 
sibly somewhere in the middle, he was a great hand 

31 



THE MOUNTAINS 

to forage. Few choice morsels escaped him. He 
confided absolutely in his rider in the matter of bad 
country, and would tackle anything I would put him 
at. It seemed that he trusted me not to put him at 
anything that would hurt him. This was an invalu- 
able trait when an example had to be set to the reluc- 
tance of the other horses. He was a great swimmer. 
Probably the most winning quality of his nature was 
his extreme friendliness. He was always wandering 
into camp to be petted, nibbling me over with his 
lips, begging to have his forehead rubbed, thrusting 
his nose under an elbow, and otherwise telling how 
much he thought of us. Whoever broke him did a 
good job. I never rode a better-reined horse. A mere 
indication of the bridle-hand turned him to right or 
left, and a mere raising of the hand without the slight- 
est pressure on the bit stopped him short. And how 
well he understood cow-work ! Turn him loose after 
the bunch, and he would do the rest. All I had to do 
was to stick to him. That in itself was no mean task, 
for he turned like a flash, and was quick as a cat on 
his feet. At night I always let him go foot free. 
He would be there in the morning, and I could al- 
ways walk directly up to him with the bridle in plain 
sight in my hand. Even at a feedless camp we once 
made where we had shot a couple of deer, he did 
not attempt to wander off in search of pasture, as 
would most horses. He nosed around unsuccessfully 
until pitch dark, then came into camp, and with great 

32 



ON HORSES 

philosophy stood tail to the fire until morning. I 
could always jump off anywhere for a shot, without 
even the necessity of " tying him to the ground," by 
throwing the reins over his head. He would wait for 
me, although he was never overfond of firearms. 

Nevertheless Bullet had his own sense of dignity. 
He was literally as gentle as a kitten, but he drew a 
line. I shall never forget how once, being possessed 
of a desire to find out whether we could swim our 
outfit across a certain stretch of the Merced River, I 
climbed him bareback. He bucked me off so quickly 
that I never even got settled on his back. Then he 
gazed at me with sorrow, while, laughing irrepress- 
ibly at this unusual assertion of independent ideas, 
I picked myself out of a wild-rose bush. He did not 
attempt to run away from me, but stood to be sad- 
dled, and plunged boldly into the swift water where 
I told him to. Merely he thought it disrespectful in 
me to ride him without his proper harness. He was 
the pet of the camp. 

As near as I could make out, he had but one fault. 
He was altogether too sensitive about his hind quar- 
ters, and would jump like a rabbit if anything touched 
him there. 

Wes rode a horse we called Old Slob. Wes, be 
it premised, was an interesting companion. He had 
done everything, — seal-hunting, abalone-gathering, 
boar-hunting, all kinds of shooting, cow-punching 
in the rough Coast Ranges, and all other queer and 

33 



THE MOUNTAINS 

outlandish and picturesque vocations by which a 
man can make a living. He weighed two hundred 
and twelve pounds and was the best game shot with 
a rifle I ever saw. 

As you may imagine, Old Slob was a stocky 
individual. He was built from the ground up. His 
disposition was quiet, slow, honest. Above all, he 
gave the impression of vast, very vast experience. 
Never did he hurry his mental processes, although 
he was quick enough in his movements if need arose. 
He quite declined to worry about anything. Conse- 
quently, in spite of the fact that he carried by far the 
heaviest man in the company, he stayed always fat 
and in good condition. There was something almost 
pathetic in Old Slob's willingness to go on working, 
even when more work seemed like an imposition. 
You could not fail to fall in love with his mild in- 
quiring gentle eyes, and his utter trust in the good- 
ness of human nature. His only fault was an excess 
of caution. Old Slob was very very experienced. He 
knew all about trails, and he declined to be hurried 
over what he considered a bad place. Wes used 
sometimes to disagree with him as to what consti- 
tuted a bad place. " Some day you 're going to take 
a tumble, you old fool," Wes used to address him, 
" if you go on fiddling down steep rocks with your 
little old monkey work. Why don't you step out*?" 
Only Old Slob never did take a tumble. He was 
willing to do anything for you, even to the assuming 

34 



ON HORSES 

of a pack. This is considered by a saddle-animal dis- 
tinctly as a come-down. 

The Tenderfoot, by the irony of fate, drew a ten- 
derfoot horse. Tunemah was a big fool gray that 
was constitutionally rattle-brained. He meant well 
enough, but he did n't know anything. When he 
came to a bad place in the trail, he took one good 
look — and rushed it. Constantly we expected him 
to come to grief. It wore on the Tenderfoot's nerves. 
Tunemah was always trying to wander off the trail, 
trying fool routes of his own invention. If he were 
sent ahead to set the pace, he lagged and loitered and 
constantly looked back, worried lest he get too far in 
advance and so lose the bunch. If put at the rear, he 
fretted against the bit, trying to push on at a senseless 
speed. In spite of his extreme anxiety to stay with 
the train, he would once in a blue moon get a strange 
idea of wandering off solitary through the mountains, 
passing good feed, good water, good shelter. We 
would find him, after a greater or less period of diffi- 
cult tracking, perched in a silly fashion on some ele- 
vation. Heaven knows what his idea was : it certainly 
was neither search for feed, escape, return whence he 
came, nor desire for exercise. When we came up 
with him, he would gaze mildly at us from a foolish 
vacant eye and follow us peaceably back to camp. 
Like most weak and silly people, he had occasional 
stubborn fits when you could beat him to a pulp 
without persuading him. He was one of the type 

35 



THE MOUNTAINS 

already mentioned that knows but two or three kinds 
of feed. As time went on he became thinner and 
thinner. The other horses prospered, but Tunemah 
failed. He actually did not know enough to take 
care of himself; and could not learn. Finally, when 
about two months out, we traded him at a cow-camp 
for a little buckskin called Monache. 

So much for the saddle-horses. The pack-animals 
were four. 

A study of Dinkey's character and an experience 
of her characteristics always left me with mingled 
feelings. At times I was inclined to think her per- 
fection : at other times thirty cents would have been 
esteemed by me as a liberal offer for her. To enume- 
rate her good points : she was an excellent weight- 
carrier; took good care of her pack that it never 
scraped nor bumped ; knew all about trails, the pos- 
sibilities of short cuts, the best way of easing herself 
downhill ; kept fat and healthy in districts where 
grew next to no feed at all ; was past-mistress in the 
picking of routes through a trailless country. Her 
endurance was marvelous ; her intelligence equally 
so. In fact too great intelligence perhaps accounted 
for most of her defects. She thought too much for 
herself; she made up opinions about people; she 
speculated on just how far each member of the party, 
man or beast, would stand imposition, and tried con- 
clusions with each to test the accuracy of her specu- 
lations ; she obstinately insisted on her own way in 

36 




The spirit of malevolent mischief was hers 



ON HORSES 

going up and down hill, — a way well enough for 
Dinkey, perhaps, but hazardous to the other less skill- 
ful animals who naturally would follow her lead. If 
she did condescend to do things according to your 
ideas, it was with a mental reservation. You caught 
her sardonic eye fixed on you contemptuously. You 
felt at once that she knew another method, a much 
better method, with which yours compared most un- 
favorably. " I 'd like to kick you in the stomach," 
Wes used to say ; " you know too much for a 
horse ! " 

If one of the horses bucked under the pack, Dinkey 
deliberately tried to stampede the others — and 
generally succeeded. She invariably led them off 
whenever she could escape her picket-rope. In 
case of trouble of any sort, instead of standing still 
sensibly, she pretended to be subject to wild-eyed 
panics. It was all pretense, for when you did yield to 
temptation and light into her with the toe of your 
boot, she subsided into common sense. The spirit of 
malevolent mischief was hers. 

Her performances when she was being packed 
were ridiculously histrionic. As soon as the saddle 
was cinched, she spread her legs apart, bracing them 
firmly as though about to receive the weight of an 
iron safe. Then as each article of the pack was thrown 
across her back, she flinched and uttered the most 
heart-rending groans. We used sometimes to amuse 
ourselves by adding merely an empty sack, or 

37 



THE MOUNTAINS 

other article quite without weight. The groans and 
tremblings of the braced legs were quite as pitiful 
as though we had piled on a sack of flour. Dinkey, 
I had forgotten to state, was a white horse, and 
belonged to Wes. 

Jenny also was white and belonged to Wes. Her 
chief characteristic was her devotion to Dinkey. She 
worshiped Dinkey, and seconded her enthusiastically. 
Without near the originality of Dinkey, she was yet 
a very good and sure pack-horse. The deceiving 
part about Jenny was her eye. It was baleful with 
the spirit of evil, — snaky and black, and with green 
sideways gleams in it. Catching the flash of it, you 
would forever after avoid getting in range of her 
heels or teeth. But it was all a delusion. Jenny's 
disposition was mild and harmless. 

The third member of the pack-outfit we bought at 
an auction sale in rather a peculiar manner. About 
sixty head of Arizona horses of the C. A. Bar outfit 
were being sold. Toward the close of the afternoon 
they brought out a well-built stocky buckskin of 
first-rate appearance except that his left flank was or- 
namented with five different brands. The auctioneer 
called attention to him. 

" Here is a first-rate all-round horse," said he. 
** He is sound ; will ride, work, or pack ; perfectly 
broken, mild, and gentle. He would make a first-rate 
family horse, for he has a kind disposition." 

The official rider put a saddle on him to give him 

38 



ON HORSES 

a demonstrating turn around the track. Then that 
mild, gentle, perfectly broken family horse of kind 
disposition gave about as pretty an exhibition of 
barbed-wire bucking as you would want to see. Even 
the auctioneer had to join in the wild shriek of delight 
that went up from the crowd. He could not get a 
bid, and I bought the animal in later very cheaply. 

As I had suspected, the trouble turned out to be 
merely exuberance or nervousness before a crowd. 
He bucked once with me under the saddle ; and twice 
subsequently under a pack, — that was all. Buckshot 
was the best pack-horse we had. Bar an occasional 
saunter into the brush when he got tired of the trail, 
we had no fault to find with him. He carried a heavy 
pack, was as sure-footed as Bullet, as sagacious on 
the trail as Dinkey, and he always attended strictly 
to his own business. Moreover he knew that business 
thoroughly, knew what should be expected of him, 
accomplished it well and quietly. His disposition 
was dignified but lovable. As long as you treated 
him well, he was as gentle as you could ask. But 
once let Buckshot get it into his head that he was 
being imposed on, or once let him see that your 
temper had betrayed you into striking him when 
he thought he did not deserve it, and he cut loose 
vigorously and emphatically with his heels. He 
declined to be abused. 

There remains but Lily. I don't know just how 
to do justice to Lily — the " Lily maid." We named 

39 



THE MOUNTAINS 

her that because she looked it. Her color was a pure 
white, her eye was virginal and silly, her long bang 
strayed in wanton carelessness across her face and 
eyes, her expression was foolish, and her legs were 
long and rangy. She had the general appearance of 
an overgrown school-girl too big for short dresses and 
too young for long gowns ; — a school-girl named 
Flossie, or Mamie, or Lily. So we named her that. 

At first hers was the attitude of the timid and 
shrinking tenderfoot. She stood in awe of her com- 
panions; she appreciated her lack of experience. 
Humbly she took the rear; slavishly she copied the 
other horses ; closely she clung to camp. Then in a 
few weeks, like most tenderfeet, she came to think 
that her short experience had taught her everything 
there was to know. She put on airs. She became 
too cocky and conceited for words. 

Everything she did was exaggerated, overdone. 
She assumed her pack with an air that plainly said, 
" Just see what a good horse am I ! " She started out 
three seconds before the others in a manner intended 
to shame their procrastinating ways. Invariably she 
was the last to rest, and the first to start on again. 
She climbed over-vigorously, with the manner of 
conscious rectitude. " Acts like she was trying to 
get her wages raised," said Wes. 

In this manner she wore herself down. If per- 
mitted she would have climbed until winded, and 
then would probably have fallen off somewhere for 

40 



ON HORSES 

lack of strength. Where the other horses watched the 
movements of those ahead, in order that when a halt 
for rest was called they might stop at an easy place on 
the trail, Lily would climb on until jammed against 
the animal immediately preceding her. Thus often 
she found herself forced to cling desperately to ex- 
tremely bad footing until the others were ready to 
proceed. Altogether she was a precious nuisance, that 
acted busily but without thinking. 

Two virtues she did possess. She was a glutton 
for work ; and she could fall far and hard without 
injuring herself. This was lucky, for she was always 
falling. Several times we went down to her fully ex- 
pecting to find her dead or so crippled that she would 
have to be shot. The loss of a little skin was her only 
injury. She got to be quite philosophic about it. On 
losing her balance she would tumble peaceably, and 
then would lie back with an air of luxury, her eyes 
closed, while we worked to free her. When we had 
loosened the pack, Wes would twist her tail. There- 
upon she would open one eye inquiringly as though 
to say, " Hullo ! Done already ? " Then leisurely 
she would arise and shake herself. 



4i 



ON HOW TO GO ABOUT IT 



IV 
ON HOW TO GO ABOUT IT 

ONE truth you must learn to accept, believe as 
a tenet of your faith, and act upon always. It 
is that your entire welfare depends on the condition 
of your horses. They must, as a consequence, receive 
always your first consideration. As long as they have 
rest and food, you are sure of getting along ; as soon 
as they fail, you are reduced to difficulties. So abso- 
lute is this truth that it has passed into an idiom. 
When a Westerner wants to tell you that he lacks 
a thing, he informs you he is " afoot " for it. " Give 
me a fill for my pipe," he begs; " I 'm plumb afoot 
for tobacco." 

Consequently you think last of your own comfort. 
In casting about for a place to spend the night, you 
look out for good feed. That assured, all else is of 
slight importance ; you make the best of whatever 
camping facilities may happen to be attached. If 
necessary you will sleep on granite or in a marsh, 
walk a mile for firewood or water, if only your ani- 
mals are well provided for. And on the trail you 
often will work twice as hard as they merely to save 
them a little. In whatever I may tell you regarding 
practical expedients, keep this always in mind. 

45 



THE MOUNTAINS 

As to the little details of your daily routine in the 
mountains, many are worth setting down, however 
trivial they may seem. They mark the difference be- 
tween the greenhorn and the old-timer; but, more 
important, they mark also the difference between the 
right and the wrong, the efficient and the inefficient 
ways of doing things. 

In the morning the cook for the day is the first man 
afoot, usually about half past four. He blows on his 
fingers, casts malevolent glances at the sleepers, finally 
builds his fire and starts his meal. Then he takes fiend- 
ish delight in kicking out the others. They do not 
run with glad shouts to plunge into the nearest pool, 
as most camping fiction would have us believe. Not 
they. The glad shout and nearest pool can wait until 
noon when the sun is warm. They, too, blow on their 
fingers and curse the cook for getting them up so 
early. All eat breakfast and feel better. 

Now the cook smokes in lordly ease. One of the 
other men washes the dishes, while his companion 
goes forth to drive in the horses. Washing dishes is 
bad enough, but fumbling with frozen fingers at stub- 
born hobble-buckles is worse. At camp the horses 
are caught, and each is tied near his own saddle and 
pack. 

The saddle-horses are attended to first. Thus they 
are available for business in case some of the others 
should make trouble. You will see that your saddle- 
blankets are perfectly smooth, and so laid that the 

46 



ON HOW TO GO ABOUT IT 

edges are to the front where they are least likely to 
roll under or wrinkle. After the saddle is in place, 
lift it slightly and loosen the blanket along the back- 
bone so it will not draw down tight under the weight 
of the rider. Next hang your rifle-scabbard under 
your left leg. It should be slanted along the horse's 
side at such an angle that neither will the muzzle 
interfere with the animal's hind leg, nor the butt with 
your bridle-hand. This angle must be determined by 
experiment. The loop in front should be attached to 
the scabbard, so it can be hung over the horn ; that 
behind to the saddle, so the muzzle can be thrust 
through it. When you come to try this method, you 
will appreciate its handiness. Besides the rifle, you 
will carry also your rope, camera, and a sweater or 
waistcoat for changes in temperature. In your saddle- 
bags are pipe and tobacco, perhaps a chunk of bread, 
your note-book, and the map — if there is any. Thus 
your saddle-horse is outfitted. Do not forget your col- 
lapsible rubber cup. About your waist you will wear 
your cartridge-belt with six-shooter and sheath-knife. 
I use a forty-five caliber belt. By threading a buck- 
skin thong in and out through some of the cartridge- 
loops, their size is sufficiently reduced to hold also the 
30-40 rifle cartridges. Thus I carry ammunition for 
both revolver and rifle in the one belt. The belt 
should not be buckled tight about your waist, but 
should hang well down on the hip. This is for two 
reasons. In the first place, it does not drag so heavily 

47 



THE MOUNTAINS 

at your anatomy, and falls naturally into position when 
you are mounted. In the second place, you can jerk 
your gun out more easily from a loose-hanging hol- 
ster. Let your knife-sheath be so deep as almost to 
cover the handle, and the knife of the very best steel 
procurable. I like a thin blade. If you are a student 
of animal anatomy, you can skin and quarter a deer 
with nothing heavier than a pocket-knife. 

When you come to saddle the pack-horses, you 
must exercise even greater care in getting the saddle- 
blankets smooth and the saddle in place. There is 
some give and take to a rider ; but a pack carries 
" dead," and gives the poor animal the full handicap 
of its weight at all times. A rider dismounts in bad 
or steep places ; a pack stays on until the morning's 
journey is ended. See to it, then, that it is on right. 

Each horse should have assigned him a definite 
and, as nearly as possible, unvarying pack. Thus you 
will not have to search everywhere for the things 
you need. 

For example, in our own case, Lily was known as 
the cook-horse. She carried all the kitchen utensils, 
the fire-irons, the axe, and matches. In addition her 
alforjas contained a number of little bags in which 
were small quantities for immediate use of all the dif- 
ferent sorts of provisions we had with us. When 
we made camp we unpacked her near the best place 
for a fire, and everything was ready for the cook. 
Jenny was a sort of supply store, for she transported 

48 



ON HOW TO GO ABOUT IT 

the main stock of the provisions of which Lily's little 
bags contained samples. Dinkey helped out Jenny, 
and in addition — since she took such good care 
of her pack — was intrusted with the fishing-rods, 
the shot-gun, the medicine-bag, small miscellaneous 
duffle, and whatever deer or bear meat we happened 
to have. Buckshot's pack consisted of things not 
often used, such as all the ammunition, the horse- 
shoeing outfit, repair-kit, and the like. It was rarely 
disturbed at all. 

These various things were all stowed away in the 
kyacks or alforjas which hung on either side. They 
had to be very accurately balanced. The least differ- 
ence in weight caused one side to sag, and that in 
turn chafed the saddle-tree against the animal's 
withers. 

So far, so good. Next comes the affair of the top 
packs. Lay your duffle-bags across the middle of the 
saddle. Spread the blankets and quilts as evenly as 
possible. Cover all with the canvas tarpaulin suitably 
folded. Everything is now ready for the pack-rope. 

The first thing anybody asks you when it is dis- 
covered that you know a little something of pack- 
trains is, " Do you throw the Diamond Hitch *? " 
Now the Diamond is a pretty hitch and a firm one, 
but it is by no means the fetish some people make 
of it. They would have you believe that it repre- 
sents the height of the packer's art ; and once having 
mastered it, they use it religiously for every weight, 

49 



THE MOUNTAINS 

shape, and size of pack. The truth of the matter is 
that the style of hitch should be varied according to 
the use to which it is to be put. 

The Diamond is good because it holds firmly, is 
a great flattener, and is especially adapted to the 
securing of square boxes. It is celebrated because it 
is pretty and rather difficult to learn. Also it possesses 
the advantage for single-handed packing that it can 
be thrown slack throughout and then tightened, and 
that the last pull tightens the whole hitch. However, 
for ordinary purposes, with a quiet horse and a com- 
paratively soft pack, the common Square Hitch holds 
well enough and is quickly made. For a load of 
small articles and heavy alforjas there is nothing like 
the Lone Packer. It too is a bit hard to learn. Chiefly 
is it valuable because the last pulls draw the alforjas 
away from the horse's sides, thus preventing their 
chafing him. Of the many hitches that remain, you 
need learn, to complete your list for all practical pur- 
poses, only the Bucking Hitch. It is complicated, 
and takes time and patience to throw, but it is war- 
ranted to hold your deck-load through the most vio- 
lent storms bronco ingenuity can stir up. 

These four will be enough. Learn to throw them, 
and take pains always to throw them good and tight. 
A loose pack is the best expedient the enemy of your 
soul could possibly devise. It always turns or comes 
to pieces on the edge of things ; and then you will 
spend the rest of the morning trailing a wildly buck- 

5° 



ON HOW TO GO ABOUT IT 

ing horse by the burst and scattered articles of camp 
duffle. It is furthermore your exhilarating task, after 
you have caught him, to take stock, and spend most 
of the afternoon looking for what your first search 
passed by. Wes and I once hunted two hours for 
as large an object as a Dutch oven. After which you 
can repack. This time you will snug things down. 
You should have done so in the beginning. 

Next, the lead-ropes are made fast to the top of 
the packs. There is here to be learned a certain knot. 
In case of trouble you can reach from your saddle 
and jerk the whole thing free by a single pull on a 
loose end. 

All is now ready. You take a last look around to 
see that nothing has been left. One of the horsemen 
starts on ahead. The pack-horses swing in behind. 
We soon accustomed ours to recognize the whistling 
of " Boots and Saddles " as a signal for the advance. 
Another horseman brings up the rear. The day's 
journey has begun. 

To one used to pleasure-riding the affair seems 
almost too deliberate. The leader plods steadily, stop- 
ping from time to time to rest on the steep slopes. 
The others string out in a leisurely procession. It 
does no good to hurry. The horses will of their own 
accord stay in sight of one another, and constant 
nagging to keep the rear closed up only worries them 
without accomplishing any valuable result. In going 
uphill especially, let the train take its time. Each 

5i 



THE MOUNTAINS 

animal is likely to have his own ideas about when and 
where to rest. If he does, respect them. See to it 
merely that there is no prolonged yielding to the 
temptation of meadow feed, and no careless or ma- 
licious straying off the trail. A minute's difference in 
the time of arrival does not count. Remember that 
the horses are doing hard and continuous work on a 
grass diet. 

The day's distance will not seem to amount to 
much in actual miles, especially if, like most Califor- 
nians, you are accustomed on a fresh horse to make 
an occasional sixty or seventy between suns; but 
it ought to suffice. There is a lot to be seen and 
enjoyed in a mountain mile. Through the high coun- 
try two miles an hour is a fair average rate of speed, 
so you can readily calculate that fifteen make a pretty 
long day. You will be afoot a good share of the time. 
If you were out from home for only a few hours' 
jaunt, undoubtedly you would ride your horse over 
places where in an extended trip you will prefer to 
lead him. It is always a question of saving your 
animals. 

About ten o'clock you must begin to figure on 
water. No horse will drink in the cool of the morn- 
ing, and so, when the sun gets well up, he will be 
thirsty. Arrange it. 

As to the method of travel, you can either stop at 
noon or push straight on through. We usually arose 
about half past four ; got under way by seven ; and 

52 



ON HOW TO GO ABOUT IT 

then rode continuously until ready to make the next 
camp. In the high country this meant until two or 
three in the afternoon, by which time both we and the 
horses were pretty hungry. But when we did make 
camp, the horses had until the following morning to 
get rested and to graze, while we had all the remainder 
of the afternoon to fish, hunt, or loaf. Sometimes, 
however, it was more expedient to make a lunch-camp 
at noon. Then we allowed an hour for grazing, and 
about half an hour to pack and unpack. It meant 
steady work for ourselves. To unpack, turn out the 
horses, cook, wash dishes, saddle up seven animals, 
and repack, kept us very busy. There remained not 
much leisure to enjoy the scenery. It freshened the 
horses, however, which was the main point. I should 
say the first method was the better for ordinary jour- 
neys ; and the latter for those times when, to reach 
good feed, a forced march becomes necessary. 

On reaching the night's stopping-place, the cook 
for the day unpacks the cook-horse and at once sets 
about the preparation of dinner. The other two at- 
tend to the animals. And no matter how tired you 
are, or how hungry you may be, you must take time 
to bathe their backs with cold water; to stake the 
picket-animal where it will at once get good feed and 
not tangle its rope in bushes, roots, or stumps ; to 
hobble the others ; and to bell those inclined to wan- 
der. After this is done, it is well, for the peace and 
well-being of the party, to take food. 

S3 



THE MOUNTAINS 

A smoke establishes you in the final and normal 
attitude of good humor. Each man spreads his tar- 
paulin where he has claimed his bed. Said claim is 
indicated by his hat thrown down where he wishes 
to sleep. It is a mark of pre-emption which every one 
is bound to respect. Lay out your saddle-blankets, 
cover them with your quilt, place the sleeping- 
blanket on top, and fold over the tarpaulin to cover 
the whole. At the head deposit your duffle-bag. Thus 
are you assured of a pleasant night. 

About dusk you straggle in with trout or game. 
The camp-keeper lays aside his mending or his re- 
pairing or his note-book, and stirs up the cooking- 
fire. The smell of broiling and frying and boiling 
arises in the air. By the dancing flame of the camp- 
fire you eat your third dinner for the day — in the 
mountains all meals are dinners, and formidable ones 
at that. The curtain of blackness draws down close. 
Through it shine stars, loom mountains cold and 
mist-like in the moon. You tell stories. You smoke 
pipes. After a time the pleasant chill creeps down 
from the eternal snows. Some one throws another 
handful of pine-cones on the fire. Sleepily you pre- 
pare for bed. The pine-cones flare up, throwing their 
light in your eyes. You turn over and wrap the soft 
woolen blanket close about your chin. You wink 
drowsily and at once you are asleep. Along late in 
the night you awaken to find your nose as cold as a 
dog's. You open one eye. A few coals mark where 

54 



ON HOW TO GO ABOUT IT 

the fire has been. The mist mountains have drawn 
nearer, they seem to bend over you in silent contem- 
plation. The moon is sailing high in the heavens. 

With a sigh you draw the canvas tarpaulin over 
your head. Instantly it is morning. 



55 



THE COAST RANGES 



THE COAST RANGES 

AT last, on the day appointed, we, with five 
horses, climbed the Cold Spring Trail to the 
ridge; and then, instead of turning to the left, we 
plunged down the zigzag lacets of the other side. 
That night we camped at Mono Canon, feeling our- 
selves strangely an integral part of the relief map we 
had looked upon so many times that almost we had 
come to consider its features as in miniature, not 
capacious for the accommodation of life-sized men. 
Here we remained a day while we rode the hills in 
search of Dinkey and Jenny, there pastured. 

We found Jenny peaceful and inclined to be cor- 
ralled. But Dinkey, followed by a slavishly adoring 
brindle mule, declined to be rounded up. We chased 
her up hill and down ; along creek-beds and through 
the spiky chaparral. Always she dodged craftily, 
warily, with forethought. Always the brindled mule, 
wrapt in admiration at his companion's cleverness, 
crashed along after. Finally we teased her into a 
narrow canon. Wes and the Tenderfoot closed the 
upper end. I attempted to slip by to the lower, but 
was discovered. Dinkey tore a frantic mile down the 
side hill. Bullet, his nostrils wide, his ears back, raced 

59 



THE MOUNTAINS 

parallel in the boulder-strewn stream-bed, wonderful 
in his avoidance of bad footing, precious in his selec- 
tion of good, interested in the game, indignant at the 
wayward Dinkey, profoundly contemptuous of the 
besotted mule. At a bend in the canon interposed 
a steep bank. Up this we scrambled, dirt and stones 
flying. I had just time to bend low along the saddle 
when, with the ripping and tearing and scratching of 
thorns, we burst blindly through a thicket. In the 
open space on the farther side Bullet stopped, panting 
but triumphant. Dinkey, surrounded at last, turned 
back toward camp with an air of utmost indifference. 
The mule dropped his long ears and followed. 

At camp we corralled Dinkey, but left her friend 
to shift for himself. Then was lifted up his voice in 
mulish lamentations until, cursing, we had to ride out 
bareback and drive him far into the hills and there 
stone him into distant fear. Even as we departed up 
the trail the following day the voice of his sorrow, 
diminishing like the echo of grief, appealed uselessly 
to Dinkey's sympathy. For Dinkey, once captured, 
seemed to have shrugged her shoulders and accepted 
inevitable toil with a real though cynical philosophy. 

The trail rose gradually by imperceptible grada- 
tions and occasional climbs. We journeyed in the 
great canons. High chaparral flanked the trail, occa- 
sional wide gray stretches of " old man " filled the air 
with its pungent odor and with the calls of its quail. 
The crannies of the rocks, the stretches of wide loose 

60 



THE COAST RANGES 

shale, the crumbling bottom earth offered to the 
eye the dessicated beauties of creamy yucca, of yerba 
buena, of the gaudy red paint-brushes, the Spanish 
bayonet ; and to the nostrils the hot dry perfumes of 
the semi-arid lands. The air was tepid ; the sun hot. 
A sing-song of bees and locusts and strange insects 
lulled the mind. The ponies plodded on cheerfully. 
We expanded and basked and slung our legs over 
the pommels of our saddles and were glad we had 
come. 

At no time did we seem to be climbing moun- 
tains. Rather we wound in and out, round and about, 
through a labyrinth of valleys and canons and ra- 
vines, farther and farther into a mysterious shut-in 
country that seemed to have no end. Once in a while, 
to be sure, we zigzagged up a trifling ascent ; but it 
was nothing. And then at a certain point the Ten- 
derfoot happened to look back. 

" Well ! " he gasped ; " will you look at that ! " 

We turned. Through a long straight aisle which 
chance had placed just there, we saw far in the dis- 
tance a sheer slate-colored wall; and beyond, still 
farther in the distance, overtopping the slate-colored 
wall by a narrow strip, another wall of light azure 
blue. 

" It 's our mountains," said Wes, " and that blue 
ridge is the channel islands. We 've got up higher 
than our range." 

We looked about us, and tried to realize that we 
61 



THE MOUNTAINS 

were actually more than halfway up the formidable 
ridge we had so often speculated on from the Cold 
Spring Trail. But it was impossible. In a few mo- 
ments, however, our broad easy canon narrowed. 
Huge crags and sheer masses of rock hemmed us 
in. The chaparral and yucca and yerba buena gave 
place to pine-trees and mountain oaks, with little 
close clumps of cotton woods in the stream bottom. 
The brook narrowed and leaped, and the white of 
alkali faded from its banks. We began to climb 
in good earnest, pausing often for breath. The view 
opened. We looked back on whence we had come, 
and saw again, from the reverse, the forty miles of 
ranges and valleys we had viewed from the Ridge 
Trail. 

At this point we stopped to shoot a rattlesnake. 
Dinkey and Jenny took the opportunity to push 
ahead. From time to time we would catch sight 
of them traveling earnestly on, following the trail 
accurately, stopping at stated intervals to rest, doing 
their work, conducting themselves as decorously as 
though drivers had stood over them with blacksnake 
whips. We tried a little to catch up. 

" Never mind," said Wes, " they 've been over this 
trail before. They '11 stop when they get to where 
we 're going to camp." 

We halted a moment on the ridge to look back 
over the lesser mountains and the distant ridge, be- 
yond which the islands now showed plainly. Then 

62 



THE COAST RANGES 

we dropped down behind the divide into a cup val- 
ley containing a little meadow with running water on 
two sides of it and big pines above. The meadow 
was brown, to be sure, as all typical California is at 
this time of year. But the brown of California and 
the brown of the East are two different things. Here 
is no snow or rain to mat down the grass, to suck 
out of it the vital principles. It grows ripe and sweet 
and soft, rich with the life that has not drained away, 
covering the hills and valleys with the effect of beaver 
fur, so that it seems the great round-backed hills must 
have in a strange manner the yielding flesh-elasticity 
of living creatures. The brown of California is the 
brown of ripeness ; not of decay. 

Our little meadow was beautifully named Ma- 
dulce, 1 and was just below the highest point of this 
section of the Coast Range. The air drank fresh with 
the cool of elevation. We went out to shoot supper ; 
and so found ourselves on a little knoll fronting the 
brown-hazed east. As we stood there, enjoying the 
breeze after our climb, a great wave of hot air swept 
by us, rilling our lungs with heat, scorching our faces 
as the breath of a furnace. Thus was brought to our 
minds what, in the excitement of a new country, we 
had forgotten, — that we were at last on the eastern 
slope, and that before us waited the Inferno of the 
desert. 

That evening we lay in the sweet ripe grasses of 

1 In all Spanish names the final e should be pronounced. 
63 



THE MOUNTAINS 

Madulce, and talked of it. Wes had been across it 
once before and did not possess much optimism with 
which to comfort us. 

" It 's hot, just plain hot," said he, " and that 's all 
there is about it. And there 's mighty little water, 
and what there is is sickish and a long ways apart. 
And the sun is strong enough to roast potatoes in." 

" Why not travel at night *? " we asked. 

"No place to sleep under daytimes," explained 
Wes. " It 's better to keep traveling and then get 
a chance for a little sleep in the cool of the night." 

We saw the reasonableness of that. 

"Of course we '11 start early, and take a long noon- 
ing, and travel late. We won't get such a lot of 
sleep." 

" How long is it going to take us ? " 

Wes calculated. 

" About eight days," he said soberly. 

The next morning we descended from Madulce 
abruptly by a dirt trail, almost perpendicular until we 
slid into a canon of sage-brush and quail, of mescale 
cactus and the fierce dry heat of sun-baked shale. 

" Is it any hotter than this on the desert % " we in- 
quired. 

Wes looked on us with pity. 

"This is plumb arctic," said he. 

Near noon we came to a little cattle ranch situ- 
ated in a flat surrounded by red dikes and buttes 
after the manner of Arizona. Here we unpacked, 

64 



THE COAST RANGES 

early as it was, for through the dry countries one has 
to apportion his day's journeys by the water to be 
had. If we went farther to-day, then to-morrow night 
would find us in a dry camp. 

The horses scampered down the flat to search out 
alfilaria. We roosted under a slanting shed, — where 
were stock saddles, silver-mounted bits and spurs, 
rawhide riatas, branding-irons, and all the lumber of 
the cattle business, — and hung out our tongues and 
gasped for breath and earnestly desired the sun to 
go down or a breeze to come up. The breeze shortly 
did so. It was a hot breeze, and availed merely to 
cover us with dust, to swirl the stable-yard into our 
faces. Great swarms of flies buzzed and lit and stung. 
Wes, disgusted, went over to where a solitary cow- 
puncher was engaged in shoeing a horse. Shortly 
we saw Wes pressed into service to hold the horse's 
hoof. He raised a pathetic face to us, the big round 
drops chasing each other down it as fast as rain. We 
grinned and felt better. 

The fierce perpendicular rays of the sun beat down. 
The air under the shed grew stuffier and more op- 
pressive, but it was the only patch of shade in all that 
pink and red furnace of a little valley. The Tender- 
foot discovered a pair of horse-clippers, and, be- 
coming slightly foolish with the heat, insisted on our 
barbering his head. We told him it was cooler with 
hair than without ; and that the flies and sun would 
be offered thus a beautiful opportunity, but without 

65 



THE MOUNTAINS 

avail. So we clipped him, — leaving, however, a beau- 
tiful long scalp-lock in the middle of his crown. He 
looked like High-low-kickapoo-waterpot, chief of 
the Wam-wams. After a while he discovered it, and 
was unhappy. 

Shortly the riders began to come in, jingling up to 
the shed, with a rattle of spurs and bit-chains. There 
they unsaddled their horses, after which, with great 
unanimity, they soused their heads in the horse-trough. 
The chief, a six-footer, wearing beautifully decorated 
gauntlets and a pair of white buckskin chaps, went 
so far as to say it was a little warm for the time of 
year. In the freshness of evening, when frazzled 
nerves had regained their steadiness, he returned to 
smoke and yarn with us and tell us of the peculiari- 
ties of the cattle business in the Cuyamas. At present 
he and his men were riding the great mountains, driv- 
ing the cattle to the lowlands in anticipation of a 
rodeo the following week. A rodeo under that sun ! 

We slept in the ranch vehicles, so the air could get 
under us. While the stars still shone, we crawled 
out, tired and unrefreshed. The Tenderfoot and I 
went down the valley after the horses. While we 
looked, the dull pallid gray of dawn filtered into the 
darkness, and so we saw our animals, out of propor- 
tion, monstrous in the half light of that earliest morn- 
ing. Before the range riders were even astir we had 
taken up our journey, filching thus a few hours from 
the mimical sun. 

66 



THE COAST RANGES 

Until ten o'clock we traveled in the valley of the 
Cuyamas. The river was merely a broad sand and 
stone bed, although undoubtedly there was water 
below the surface. California rivers are said to flow 
bottom up. To the northward were mountains typi- 
cal of the arid countries, — boldly denned, clear in 
the edges of their folds, with sharp shadows and hard, 
uncompromising surfaces. They looked brittle and 
hollow, as though made of papier mache and set down 
in the landscape. A long four hours' noon we spent 
beneath a live-oak near a tiny spring. I tried to hunt, 
but had to give it up. After that I lay on my back 
and shot doves as they came to drink at the spring. 
It was better than walking about, and quite as effect- 
ive as regards supper. A band of cattle filed stolidly 
in, drank, and filed as stolidly away. Some half-wild 
horses came to the edge of the hill, stamped, snorted, 
essayed a tentative advance. Them we drove away, 
lest they decoy our own animals. The flies would 
not let us sleep. Dozens of valley and mountain 
quail called with maddening cheerfulness and energy. 
By a mighty exercise of will we got under way again. 
In an hour we rode out into what seemed to be a 
grassy foot-hill country, supplied with a most refresh- 
ing breeze. 

The little round hills of a few hundred feet rolled 
gently away to the artificial horizon made by their 
closing in. The trail meandered white and distinct 
through the clear fur-like brown of their grasses. Cat- 

67 



THE MOUNTAINS 

tie grazed. Here and there grew live-oaks, planted 
singly as in a park. Beyond we could imagine the 
great plain, grading insensibly into these little hills. 

And then all at once we surmounted a slight ele- 
vation, and found that we had been traveling on a 
plateau, and that these apparent little hills were in 
reality the peaks of high mountains. 

We stood on the brink of a wide smooth velvet- 
creased range that dipped down and down to minia- 
ture canons far below. Not a single little boulder 
broke the rounded uniformity of the wild grasses. 
Out from beneath us crept the plain, sluggish and 
inert with heat. 

Threads of trails, dull white patches of alkali, vague 
brown areas of brush, showed indeterminate for a lit- 
tle distance. But only for a little distance. Almost 
at once they grew dim, faded in the thickness of atmo- 
sphere, lost themselves in the mantle of heat that lay 
palpable and brown like a shimmering changing veil, 
hiding the distance in mystery and in dread. It was 
a land apart ; a land to be looked on curiously from 
the vantage-ground of safety, — as we were looking 
on it from the shoulder of the mountain, — and then 
to be turned away from, to be left waiting behind 
its brown veil for what might come. To abandon 
the high country, deliberately to cut loose from the 
known, deliberately to seek the presence that lay 
in wait, — all at once it seemed the height of gro- 
tesque perversity. We wanted to turn on our heels. 

68 



THE COAST RANGES 

We wanted to get back to our hills and fresh breezes 
and clear water, to our beloved cheerful quail, to our 
trails and the sweet upper air. 

For perhaps a quarter of an hour we sat our horses, 
gazing down. Some unknown disturbance lazily 
rifted the brown veil by ever so little. We saw, lying 
inert and languid, obscured by its own rank steam, a 
great round lake. We knew the water to be bitter, 
poisonous. The veil drew together again. Wes shook 
himself and sighed, — 

" There she is, — damn her ! " said he. 



69 



THE INFERNO 



VI 
THE INFERNO 

FOR eight days we did penance, checking off the 
hours, meeting doggedly one after another the 
disagreeable things. We were bathed in heat; we 
inhaled it ; it soaked into us until we seemed to radi- 
ate it like so many furnaces. A condition of thirst 
became the normal condition, to be only slightly 
mitigated by a few mouthfuls from zinc canteens of 
tepid water. Food had no attractions : even smoking 
did not taste good. Always the flat country stretched 
out before us. We could see far ahead a landmark 
which we would reach only by a morning's travel. 
Nothing intervened between us and it. After we 
had looked at it a while, we became possessed of an 
almost insane necessity to make a run for it. The 
slow maddening three miles an hour of the pack- 
train drove us frantic. There were times when it 
seemed that unless we shifted our gait, unless we 
stepped outside the slow strain of patience to which 
the Inferno held us relentlessly, we should lose our 
minds and run round and round in circles — as peo- 
ple often do, in the desert. 

And when the last and most formidable hundred 
yards had slunk sullenly behind us to insignificance, 

73 



THE MOUNTAINS 

and we had dared let our minds relax from the in- 
sistent need of self-control — then, beyond the cotton- 
woods, or creek-bed, or group of buildings, which- 
ever it might be, we made out another, remote as 
paradise, to which we must gain by sunset. So again 
the wagon-trail, with its white choking dust, its stag- 
gering sun, its miles made up of monotonous inches, 
each clutching for a man's sanity. 

We sang everything we knew ; we told stories ; 
we rode cross-saddle, sidewise, erect, slouching; we 
walked and led our horses ; we shook the powder of 
years from old worn jokes, conundrums, and puzzles, 
— and at the end, in spite of our best efforts, we fell 
to morose silence and the red-eyed vindictive con- 
templation of the objective point that would not 
seem to come nearer. 

For now we lost accurate sense of time. At first it 
had been merely a question of going in at one side 
of eight days, pressing through them, and coming out 
on the other side. Then the eight days would be 
behind us. But once we had entered that enchanted 
period, we found ourselves more deeply involved. 
The seemingly limited area spread with startling 
swiftness to the very horizon. Abruptly it was borne 
in on us that this was never going to end ; just as 
now for the first time we realized that it had begun 
infinite ages ago. We were caught in the entangle- 
ment of days. The Coast Ranges were the experiences 
of a past incarnation: the Mountains were a myth. 

74 



THE INFERNO 

Nothing was real but this ; and this would endure 
forever. We plodded on because somehow it was 
part of the great plan that we should do so. Not 
that it did any good : — we had long since given up 
such ideas. The illusion was very real ; perhaps it 
was the anodyne mercifully administered to those 
who pass through the Inferno. 

Most of the time we got on well enough. One 
day, only, the Desert showed her power. That day, 
at five of the afternoon, it was one hundred and 
twenty degrees in the shade. And we, through neces- 
sity of reaching the next water, journeyed over the 
alkali at noon. Then the Desert came close on us and 
looked us fair in the eyes, concealing nothing. She 
killed poor Deuce, the beautiful setter who had trav- 
eled the wild countries so long ; she struck Wes 
and the Tenderfoot from their horses when finally 
they had reached a long-legged water-tank ; she even 
staggered the horses themselves. And I, lying under 
a bush where I had stayed after the others in the hope 
of succoring Deuce, began idly shooting at ghostly 
jack-rabbits that looked real, but through which the 
revolver bullets passed without resistance. 

After this day the Tenderfoot went water-crazy. 
Watering the horses became almost a mania with 
him. He could not bear to pass even a mud-hole 
without offering the astonished Tunemah a chance 
to fill up, even though that animal had drunk freely 
not twenty rods back. As for himself, he embraced 

75 



THE MOUNTAINS 

every opportunity ; and journeyed draped in many 
canteens. 

After that it was not so bad. The thermometer 
stood from a hundred to a hundred and five or six, 
to be sure, but we were getting used to it. Discom- 
fort, ordinary physical discomfort, we came to accept 
as the normal environment of man. It is astonishing 
how soon uniformly uncomfortable conditions, by 
very lack of contrast, do lose their power to color 
the habit of mind. I imagine merely physical un- 
happiness is a matter more of contrasts than of actual 
circumstances. We swallowed dust; we humped 
our shoulders philosophically under the beating of 
the sun ; we breathed the debris of high winds ; we 
cooked anyhow, ate anything, spent long idle fly- 
infested hours waiting for the noon to pass ; we slept 
in horse-corrals, in the trail, in the dust, behind 
stables, in hay, anywhere. There was little water, 
less wood for the cooking. 

It is now all confused, an impression of events with- 
out sequence, a mass of little prominent purposeless 
things like rock conglomerate. I remember leaning 
my elbows on a low window-ledge and watching a 
poker game going on in the room of a dive. The 
light came from a sickly suspended lamp. It fell 
on five players, — two miners in their shirt-sleeves, a 
Mexican, a tough youth with side-tilted derby hat, 
and a fat gorgeously dressed Chinaman. The men 
held their cards close to their bodies, and wagered in 

76 



THE INFERNO 

silence. Slowly and regularly the great drops of sweat 
gathered on their faces. As regularly they raised the 
backs of their hands to wipe them away. Only the 
Chinaman, broad-faced, calm, impassive as Buddha, 
save for a little crafty smile in one corner of his eye, 
seemed utterly unaffected by the heat, cool as autumn. 
His loose sleeve fell back from his forearm when he 
moved his hand forward, laying his bets. A jade 
bracelet slipped back and forth as smoothly as on 
yellow ivory. 

Or again, one night when the plain was like a sea 
of liquid black, and the sky blazed with stars, we 
rode by a sheep-herder's camp. The flicker of a fire 
threw a glow out into the dark. A tall wagon, a 
group of silhouetted men, three or four squatting 
dogs, were squarely within the circle of illumination. 
And outside, in the penumbra of shifting half light, 
now showing clearly, now fading into darkness, were 
the sheep, indeterminate in bulk, melting away by 
mysterious thousands into the mass of night. We 
passed them. They looked up, squinting their eyes 
against the dazzle of their fire. The night closed 
about us again. 

Or still another : in the glare of broad noon, after 
a hot and trying day, a little inn kept by a French 
couple. And there, in the very middle of the Inferno, 
was served to us on clean scrubbed tables, a meal 
such as one gets in rural France, all complete, with 
the potage, the fish fried in oil, the wonderful ragout^ 

77 



THE MOUNTAINS 

the chicken and salad, the cheese and the black coffee, 
even the vin ordinaire. I have forgotten the name 
of the place, its location on the map, the name of its 
people, — one has little to do with detail in the In- 
ferno, — but that dinner never will I forget, any- 
more than the Tenderfoot will forget his first sight 
of water the day when the Desert " held us up." 

Once the brown veil lifted to the eastward. We, 
souls struggling, saw great mountains and the white- 
ness of eternal snow. That noon we crossed a river, 
hurrying down through the flat plain, and in its cur- 
rent came the body of a drowned bear-cub, an alien 
from the high country. 

These things should have been as signs to our 
jaded spirits that we were nearly at the end of our 
penance, but discipline had seared over our souls, and 
we rode on unknowing. 

Then we came on a real indication. It did not 
amount to much. Merely a dry river-bed ; but the 
farther bank, instead of being flat, cut into a low swell 
of land. We skirted it. Another swell of land, like 
the sullen after-heave of a storm, lay in our way. 
Then we crossed a ravine. It was not much of a ra- 
vine; in fact it was more like a slight gouge in the 
flatness of the country. After that we began to see 
oak-trees, scattered at rare intervals. So interested 
were we in them that we did not notice rocks be- 
ginning to outcrop through the soil until they had 
become numerous enough to be a feature of the land- 

78 



THE INFERNO 

scape. The hills, gently, quietly, without abrupt 
transition, almost as though they feared to awaken 
our alarm by too abrupt movement of growth, glided 
from little swells to bigger swells. The oaks gathered 
closer together. The ravine's brother could almost be 
called a canon. The character of the country had 
entirely changed. 

And yet, so gradually had this change come about 
that we did not awaken to a full realization of our 
escape. To us it was still the plain, a trifle modified 
by local peculiarity, but presently to resume its 
wonted aspect. We plodded on dully, anodyned 
with the desert patience. 

But at a little before noon, as we rounded the cheek 
of a slope, we encountered an errant current of air. 
It came up to us curiously, touched us each in turn, 
and went on. The warm furnace heat drew in on us 
again. But it had been a cool little current of air, with 
something of the sweetness of pines and water and 
snow-banks in it. The Tenderfoot suddenly reined 
in his horse and looked about him. 

" Boys ! " he cried, a new ring of joy in his voice, 
" we 're in the foot-hills ! " 

Wes calculated rapidly. " It 's the eighth day 
to-day : I guessed right on the time." 

We stretched our arms and looked about us. They 
were dry brown hills enough ; but they were hills, and 
they had trees on them, and canons in them, so to our 
eyes, wearied with flatness, they seemed wonderful. 

79 



THE FOOT-HILLS 



VII 
THE FOOT-HILLS 

AT once our spirits rose. We straightened in our 
saddles, we breathed deep, we joked. The 
country was scorched and sterile ; the wagon-trail, al- 
most paralleling the mountains themselves on a long 
easy slant toward the high country, was ankle-deep X 
in dust; the ravines were still dry of water. But it 
was not the Inferno, and that one fact sufficed. After 
a while we crossed high above a river which dashed 
white water against black rocks, and so were happy. 

The country went on changing. The change was 
always imperceptible, as is growth, or the stealthy 
advance of autumn through the woods. From 
moment to moment one could detect no alteration. 
Something intangible was taken away; something 
impalpable added. At the end of an hour we were 
in the oaks and sycamores; at the end of two we 
were in the pines and low mountains of Bret Harte's 
Forty-Nine. 

The wagon-trail felt ever farther and farther into 
the hills. It had not been used as a stage-route for 
years, but the freighting kept it deep with dust, that 
writhed and twisted and crawled lazily knee-high to 
our horses, like a living creature. We felt the swing 

83 



THE MOUNTAINS 

and sweep of the route. The boldness of its stretches, 
the freedom of its reaches for the opposite slope, the 
wide curve of its horseshoes, all filled us with the 
breath of an expansion which as yet the broad low 
country only suggested. 

Everything here was reminiscent of long ago. The 
very names hinted stories of the Argonauts. Coarse 
Gold Gulch, Whiskey Creek, Grub Gulch, Fine 
Gold Post-Office in turn we passed. Occasionally, 
with a fine round dash into the open, the trail drew 
one side to a stage-station. The huge stables, the 
wide corrals, the low living-houses, each shut in its 
dooryard of blazing riotous flowers, were all familiar. 
Only lacked the old-fashioned Concord coach, from 
which to descend Jack Hamlin or Judge Starbottle. 
As for M'liss, she was there, sunbonnet and all. 

Down in the gulch bottoms were the old placer 
diggings. Elaborate little ditches for the deflection 
of water, long cradles for the separation of gold, de- 
cayed rockers, and shining in the sun the tons and 
tons of pay dirt which had been turned over pound 
by pound in the concentrating of its treasure. Some 
of the old cabins still stood. It was all deserted now, 
save for the few who kept trail for the freighters, or 
who tilled the restricted bottom-lands of the flats. 
Road-runners racked away down the paths ; squirrels 
scurried over worn-out placers ; jays screamed and 
chattered in and out of the abandoned cabins. Strange 
and shy little creatures and birds, reassured by the 

84 



THE FOOT-HILLS 

silence of many years, had ventured to take to them- 
selves the engines of man's industry. And the warm 
California sun embalmed it all in a peaceful forget- 
fulness. 

Now the trees grew bigger, and the hills more im- 
pressive. We should call them mountains in the East. 
Pines covered them to the top, straight slender pines 
with voices. The little flats were planted with great 
oaks. When we rode through them, they shut out 
the hills, so that we might have imagined ourselves 
in the level wooded country. There insisted the effect 
of limitless tree-grown plains, which the warm drowsy 
sun, the park-like landscape, corroborated. And yet 
the contrast of the clear atmosphere and the sharp air 
equally insisted on the mountains. It was a strange 
and delicious double effect, a contradiction of natural 
impressions, a negation of our right to generalize from 
previous experience. 

Always the trail wound up and up. Never was it 
steep ; never did it command an outlook. Yet we 
felt that at last we were rising, were leaving the level 
of the Inferno, were nearing the threshold of the high 
country. 

Mountain peoples came to the edges of their clear- 
ings and gazed at us, responding solemnly to our 
salutations. They dwelt in cabins and held to agri- 
culture and the herding of the wild mountain cattle. 
From them we heard of the high country to which 
we were bound. They spoke of it as you or I 

85 



THE MOUNTAINS 

would speak of interior Africa, as something incon- 
ceivably remote, to be visited only by the adventur- 
ous, an uninhabited realm of vast magnitude and 
unknown dangers. In the same way they spoke of 
the plains. Only the narrow pine-clad strip between 
the two and six thousand feet of elevation they felt 
to be their natural environment. In it they found the 
proper conditions for their existence. Out of it those 
conditions lacked. They were as much a localized 
product as are certain plants which occur only at 
certain altitudes. Also were they densely ignorant of 
trails and routes outside of their own little districts. 

All this, you will understand, was in what is known 
as the low country. The landscape was still brown; 
the streams but trickles; sage-brush clung to the 
ravines; the valley quail whistled on the side hills. 

But one day we came suddenly into the big pines 
and rocks ; and that very night we made our first 
camp in a meadow typical of the mountains we had 
dreamed about. 



86 



THE PINES 



VIII 
THE PINES 

I DO not know exactly how to make you feel 
the charm of that first camp in the big country. 
Certainly I can never quite repeat it in my own 
experience. 

Remember that for two months we had grown 
accustomed to the brown of the California landscape, 
and that for over a week we had traveled in the 
Inferno. We had forgotten the look of green grass, 
of abundant water; almost had we forgotten the taste 
of cool air. So invariably had the trails been dusty, 
and the camping-places hard and exposed, that we 
had come subconsciously to think of such as typical 
of the country. Try to put yourself in the frame of 
mind those conditions would make. 

Then imagine yourself climbing in an hour or 
so up into a high ridge country of broad cup-like 
sweeps and bold outcropping ledges. Imagine a for- 
est of pine-trees bigger than any pines you ever saw 
before, — pines eight and ten feet through, so huge 
that you can hardly look over one of their prostrate 
trunks even from the back of your pony. Imagine, 
further, singing little streams of ice-cold water, deep 
refreshing shadows, a soft carpet of pine-needles 

89 



THE MOUNTAINS 

through which the faint furrow of the trail runs as 
over velvet. And then, last of all, in a wide opening, 
clear as though chopped and plowed by some back- 
woodsman, a park of grass, fresh grass, green as a 
precious stone. 

This was our first sight of the mountain meadows. 
From time to time we found others, sometimes a half 
dozen in a day. The rough country came down close 
about them, edging to the very hair-line of the magic 
circle, which seemed to assure their placid sunny 
peace. An upheaval of splintered granite often tossed 
and tumbled in the abandon of an unrestrained passion 
that seemed irresistibly to overwhelm the sanities 
of a whole region ; but somewhere, in the very fore- 
front of turmoil, was like to slumber one of these 
little meadows, as unconscious of anything but its 
own flawless green simplicity as a child asleep in 
mid-ocean. Or, away up in the snows, warmed 
by the fortuity of reflected heat, its emerald eye 
looked bravely out to the heavens. Or, as here, it 
rested confidingly in the very heart of the austere 
forest. 

Always these parks are green ; always are they clear 
and open. Their size varies widely. Some are as 
little as a city lawn; others, like the great Monache,' 
are miles in extent. In them resides the possibility 
of your traveling the high country ; for they supply 
the feed for your horses. 

1 Do not fail to sound the final e. 
90 



THE PINES 

Being desert-weary, the Tenderfoot and I cried out 
with the joy of it, and told in extravagant language 
how this was the best camp we had ever made. 

" It's a bum camp," growled Wes. " If we could n't 
get better camps than this, I 'd quit the game." 

He expatiated on the fact that this particular 
meadow was somewhat boggy ; that the feed was too 
watery ; that there 'd be a cold wind down through 
the pines; and other small and minor details. But 
we, our backs propped against appropriately slanted 
rocks, our pipes well aglow, gazed down the twilight 
through the wonderful great columns of the trees to 
where the white horses shone like snow against the 
unaccustomed relief of green, and laughed him to 
scorn. What did we — or the horses for that matter 
— care for trifling discomforts of the body ? In these 
intangible comforts of the eye was a great refreshment 
of the spirit. 

The following day we rode through the pine 
forests growing on the ridges and hills and in the 
elevated bowl-like hollows. These were not the so- 
called "big trees," — with those we had to do later, 
as you shall see. They were merely sugar and yellow 
pines, but never anywhere have I seen finer speci- 
mens. They were planted with a grand sumptuous- 
ness of space, and their trunks were from five to 
twelve feet in diameter and upwards of two hundred 
feet high to the topmost spear. Underbrush, ground 
growth, even saplings of the same species lacked en- 

91 



THE MOUNTAINS 

tirely, so that we proceeded in the clear open aisles 
of a tremendous and spacious magnificence. 

This very lack, of the smaller and usual growths, 
the generous plan of spacing, and the size of the trees 
themselves necessarily deprived us of a standard 
of comparison. At first the forest seemed immense. 
But after a little our eyes became accustomed to its 
proportions. We referred it back to the measures of 
long experience. The trees, the wood-aisles, the ex- 
tent of vision shrunk to the normal proportions of an 
Eastern pinery. And then we would lower our gaze. 
The pack-train would come into view. It had be- 
come lilliputian, the horses small as white mice, the 
men like tin soldiers, as though we had undergone 
an enchantment. But in a moment, with the rush of 
a mighty transformation, the great trees would tower 
huge again. 

In the pine woods of the mountains grows also a 
certain close-clipped parasitic moss. In color it is 
a brilliant yellow-green, more yellow than green. In 
shape it is crinkly and curly and tangled up with 
itself like very fine shavings. In consistency it is dry 
and brittle. This moss girdles the trunks of trees 
with innumerable parallel inch-wide bands a foot or 
so apart, in the manner of old-fashioned striped stock- 
ings. It covers entirely sundry twigless branches. 
Always in appearance is it fantastic, decorative, al- 
most Japanese, as though consciously laid in with its 
vivid yellow-green as an intentional note of a tone 

92 




On these slopes played the wind 



THE PINES 

scheme. The somberest shadows, the most neutral 
twilights, the most austere recesses are lighted by it 
as though so many freakish sunbeams had severed 
relations with the parent luminary to rest quietly in 
the coolnesses of the ancient forest. 

Underfoot the pine-needles were springy beneath 
the horse's hoof. The trail went softly, with the cour- 
tesy of great gentleness. Occasionally we caught sight 
of other ridges, — also with pines, — across deep 
sloping valleys, pine filled. The effect of the distant 
trees seen from above was that of roughened velvet, 
here smooth and shining, there dark with rich 
shadows. On these slopes played the wind. In the 
level countries it sang through the forest progress- 
ively : here on the slope it struck a thousand trees at 
once. The air was ennobled with the great voice, as 
a church is ennobled by the tones of a great organ. 
Then we would drop back again to the inner country, 
for our way did not contemplate the descents nor 
climbs, but held to the general level of a plateau. 

Clear fresh brooks ran in every ravine. Their water 
was snow-white against the black rocks ; or lay dark 
in bank-shadowed pools. As our horses splashed 
across we could glimpse the rainbow trout flashing 
to cover. Where were the watered hollows grew lush 
thickets full of birds, outposts of the aggressively 
and cheerfully worldly in this pine-land of spiritual 
detachment. Gorgeous bush-flowers, great of petal 
as magnolias, with perfume that lay on the air like 

93 



THE MOUNTAINS 

a heavy drowsiness; long clear stretches of an ankle- 
high shrub of vivid emerald, looking in the distance 
like sloping meadows of a peculiar color-brilliance ; 
patches of smaller flowers where for the trifling space 
of a street's width the sun had unobstructed fall, — 
these from time to time diversified the way, brought 
to our perceptions the endearing trifles of earthiness, 
of humanity, befittingly to modify the austerity of 
the great forest. At a brookside we saw, still fresh 
and moist, the print of a bear's foot. From a patch 
of the little emerald brush, a barren doe rose to 
her feet, eyed us a moment, and then bounded away 
as though propelled by springs. We saw her from 
time to time surmounting little elevations farther and 
farther away. 

The air was like cold water. We had not lung 
capacity to satisfy our desire for it. There came with 
it a dry exhilaration that brought high spirits, an op- 
timistic viewpoint, and a tremendous keen appetite. 
It seemed that we could never tire. In fact we never 
did. Sometimes, after a particularly hard day, we 
felt like resting; but it was always after the day's 
work was done, never while it was under way. The 
Tenderfoot and I one day went afoot twenty-two 
miles up and down a mountain fourteen thousand 
feet high. The last three thousand feet were nearly 
straight up and down. We finished at a four-mile 
clip an hour before sunset, and discussed what to 
do next to fill in the time. When we sat down, we 

94 



THE PINES 

found we had had about enough; but we had not 
discovered it before. 

All of us, even the morose and cynical Dinkey, felt 
the benefit of the change from the lower country. 
Here we were definitely in the Mountains. Our 
plateau ran from six to eight thousand feet in alti- 
tude. Beyond it occasionally we could see three more 
ridges, rising and falling, each higher than the last. 
And then, in the blue distance, the very crest of the 
broad system called the Sierras, — another wide re- 
gion of sheer granite rising in peaks, pinnacles, and 
minarets, rugged, wonderful, capped with the eternal 
snows. 



95 



THE TRAIL 



IX 

THE TRAIL 

WHEN you say " trail " to a Westerner, his eye 
lights up. This is because it means some- 
thing to him. To another it may mean something 
entirely different, for the blessed word is of that rare 
and beautiful category which is at once of the widest 
significance and the most intimate privacy to him 
who utters it. To your mind leaps the picture of 
the dim forest-aisles and the murmurings of tree-top 
breezes; to him comes a vision of the wide dusty 
desert ; to me, perhaps, a high wild country of won- 
der. To all of us it is the slender, unbroken, never- 
ending thread connecting experiences. 

For in a mysterious way, not to be understood, our 
trails never do end. They stop sometimes, and wait 
patiently while we dive in and out of houses, but 
always when we are ready to go on, they are ready 
too, and so take up the journey placidly as though 
nothing had intervened. They begin, when *? Some- 
time, away in the past, you may remember a single 
episode, vivid through the mists of extreme youth. 
Once a very little boy walked with his father under a 
green roof of leaves that seemed farther than the sky 
and as unbroken. All of a sudden the man raised 

99 

LtfC. 



THE MOUNTAINS 

his gun and fired upwards, apparently through the 
green roof. A pause ensued. Then, hurtling roughly 
through still that same green roof, a great bird fell, 
hitting the earth with a thump. The very little boy 
was I. My trail must have begun there under the 
bright green roof of leaves. 

From that earliest moment the Trail unrolls behind 
you like a thread so that never do you quite lose 
connection with your selves. There is something a 
little fearful to the imaginative in the insistence of it. 
You may camp, you may linger, but some time or 
another, sooner or later, you must go on, and when 
you do, then once again the Trail takes up its con- 
tinuity without reference to the muddied place you 
have tramped out in your indecision or indolence or 
obstinacy or necessity. It would be exceedingly cu- 
rious to follow out in patience the chart of a man's 
going, tracing the pattern of his steps with all its 
windings of nursery, playground, boys afield, coun- 
try, city, plain, forest, mountain, wilderness, home, 
always on and on into the higher country of respon- 
sibility until at the last it leaves us at the summit 
of the Great Divide. Such a pattern would tell his 
story as surely as do the tracks of a partridge on the 
snow. 

A certain magic inheres in the very name, or at 
least so it seems to me. I should be interested to 
know whether others feel the same glamour that I do 
in the contemplation of such syllables as the Lo-Lo 

ioo 



THE TRAIL 

Trail, the Tunemah Trail, the Mono Trail, the Bright 
Angel Trail. A certain elasticity of application too 
leaves room for the more connotation. A trail may 
be almost anything. There are wagon-trails which 
East would rank as macadam roads ; horse-trails that 
would compare favorably with our best bridle-paths ; 
foot-trails in the fur country worn by constant use as 
smooth as so many garden-walks. Then again there 
are other arrangements. I have heard a mule-driver 
overwhelmed with skeptical derision because he 
claimed to have upset but six times in traversing a 
certain bit of trail not over five miles long; in charts 
of the mountains are marked many trails which are 
only " ways through," — you will find few traces of 
predecessors ; the same can be said of trails in the 
great forests where even an Indian is sometimes at 
fault. " Johnny, you 're lost," accused the white man. 
" Trail lost : Injun here," denied the red man. And 
so after your experience has led you by the camp- 
fires of a thousand delights, and each of those camp- 
fires is on the Trail, which only pauses courteously 
for your stay and then leads on untiring into new 
mysteries forever and ever, you come to love it as the 
donor of great joys. You too become a Westerner, 
and when somebody says " trail," your eye too lights 
up. 

The general impression of any particular trail is 
born rather of the little incidents than of the big 
accidents. The latter are exotic, and might belong to 

IOI 



THE MOUNTAINS 

any time or places ; the former are individual. For 
the Trail is a vantage-ground, and from it, as your 
day's travel unrolls, you see many things. Nine 
tenths of your experience comes thus, for in the long 
journeys the side excursions are few enough and un- 
important enough almost to merit classification with 
the accidents. In time the character of the Trail thus 
defines itself. 

Most of all, naturally, the kind of country has to 
do with this generalized impression. Certain sur- 
prises, through trees, of vista looking out over unex- 
pected spaces ; little notches in the hills beyond which 
you gain to a placid far country sleeping under a sun 
warmer than your elevation permits; the delicious 
excitement of the moment when you approach the 
very knife-edge of the summit and wonder what lies 
beyond, — these are the things you remember with a 
warm heart. Your saddle is a point of vantage. By 
it you are elevated above the country; from it you 
can see clearly. Quail scuttle away to right and left, 
heads ducked low; grouse boom solemnly on the 
rigid limbs of pines; deer vanish through distant 
thickets to appear on yet more distant ridges, thence 
to gaze curiously, their great ears forward ; across the 
canon the bushes sway violently with the passage of 
a cinnamon bear among them, — you see them all 
from your post of observation. Your senses are 
always alert for these things ; you are always bending 
from your saddle to examine the tracks and signs 

1 02 




The trail to the canon-bed was generally dangerous 



THE TRAIL 

that continually offer themselves for your inspection 
and interpretation. 

Our trail of this summer led at a general high ele- 
vation, with comparatively little climbing and com- 
paratively easy traveling for days at a time. Then 
suddenly we would find ourselves on the brink of a 
great box canon from three to seven thousand feet 
deep, several miles wide, and utterly precipitous. In 
the bottom of this canon would be good feed, fine 
groves of trees, and a river of some size in which 
swam fish. The trail to the canon-bed was always 
bad, and generally dangerous. In many instances we 
found it bordered with the bones of horses that had 
failed. The river had somehow to be forded. We 
would camp a day or so in the good feed and among 
the fine groves of trees, fish in the river, and then 
address ourselves with much reluctance to the ascent 
of the other bad and dangerous trail on the other 
side. After that, in the natural course of events, sub- 
ject to variation, we could expect nice trails, the 
comfort of easy travel, pines, cedars, redwoods, and 
joy of life until another great cleft opened before us 
or another great mountain-pass barred our way. 

This was the web and woof of our summer. But 
through it ran the patterns of fantastic delight such 
as the West alone can offer a man's utter disbelief in 
them. Some of these patterns stand out in memory 
with peculiar distinctness. 

Below Farewell Gap is a wide canon with high 
103 



THE MOUNTAINS 

walls of dark rock, and down those walls run many 
streams of water. They are white as snow with the 
dash of their descent, but so distant that the eye can- 
not distinguish their motion. In the half light of 
dawn, with the yellow of sunrise behind the moun- 
tains, they look like gauze streamers thrown out from 
the windows of morning to celebrate the solemn 
pageant of the passing of many hills. 

Again, I know of a canon whose westerly wall is 
colored in the dull rich colors, the fantastic patterns 
of a Moorish tapestry. Umber, seal brown, red, terra- 
cotta, orange, Nile green, emerald, purple, cobalt 
blue, gray, lilac, and many other colors, all rich with 
the depth of satin, glow wonderful as the craftiest 
textures. Only here the fabric is five miles long and 
half a mile wide. 

There is no use in telling of these things. They, 
and many others of their like, are marvels, and exist ; 
but you cannot tell about them, for the simple rea- 
son that the average reader concludes at once you 
must be exaggerating, must be carried away by the 
swing of words. The cold sober truth is, you cannot 
exaggerate. They have n't made the words. Talk 
as extravagantly as you wish to one who will in the 
most childlike manner believe every syllable you 
utter. Then take him into the Big Country. He will 
probably say, " Why, you did n't tell me it was go- 
ing to be anything like this ! " We in the East have 
no standards of comparison either as regards size or 

104 



THE TRAIL 

as regards color — especially color. Some people 
once directed me to " The Gorge " on the New Eng- 
land coast. I couldn't find it. They led me to it, 
and rhapsodized over its magnificent terror. I could 
have ridden a horse into the ridiculous thing. As for 
color, no Easterner believes in it when such men as 
Lungren or Parrish transposit it faithfully, any more 
than a Westerner would believe in the autumn foli- 
age of our own hardwoods, or an Englishman in the 
glories of our gaudiest sunsets. They are all true. 

In the mountains, the high mountains above the 
seven or eight thousand foot level, grows an affair 
called the snow-plant. It is, when full grown, about 
two feet in height, and shaped like a loosely con- 
structed pine-cone set up on end. Its entire sub- 
stance is like wax, and the whole concern — stalk, 
broad curling leaves, and all — is a brilliant scarlet. 
Sometime you will ride through the twilight of deep 
pine woods growing on the slope of the mountain, 
a twilight intensified, rendered more sacred to your 
mood by the external brilliancy of a glimpse of vivid 
blue sky above dazzling snow mountains far away. 
Then, in this monotone of dark green frond and dull 
brown trunk and deep olive shadow, where, like 
the ordered library of one with quiet tastes, nothing 
breaks the harmony of unobtrusive tone, suddenly 
flames the vivid red of a snow-plant. You will never 
forget it. 

Flowers in general seem to possess this concen- 
ts 



THE MOUNTAINS 

trated brilliancy both of color and of perfume. You 
will ride into and out of strata of perfume as sharply 
defined as are the quartz strata on the ridges. They 
lie sluggish and cloying in the hollows, too heavy to 
rise on the wings of the air. 

As for color, you will see all sorts of queer things. 
The ordered flower-science of your childhood has 
gone mad. You recognize some of your old friends, 
but strangely distorted and changed, — even the dear 
old " butter 'n eggs " has turned pink ! Patches of 
purple, of red, of blue, of yellow, of orange are laid 
in the hollows or on the slopes like brilliant blankets 
out to dry in the sun. The fine grasses are spangled 
with them, so that in the cup of the great fierce 
countries the meadows seem like beautiful green 
ornaments enameled with jewels. The Mariposa 
Lily, on the other hand, is a poppy-shaped flower 
varying from white to purple, and with each petal 
decorated by an "eye" exactly like those on the 
great Cecropia or Polyphemus moths, so that their 
effect is that of a flock of gorgeous butterflies come 
to rest. They hover over the meadows poised. A 
movement would startle them to flight; only the 
proper movement somehow never comes. 

The great redwoods, too, add to the colored-edi- 
tion impression of the whole country. A redwood, 
as perhaps you know, is a tremendous big tree some- 
times as big as twenty feet in diameter. It is exquis- 
itely proportioned like a fluted column of noble 

1 06 



THE TRAIL 

height. Its bark is slightly furrowed longitudinally, and 
of a peculiar elastic appearance that lends it an almost 
perfect illusion of breathing animal life. The color 
is a rich umber red. Sometimes in the early morning 
or the late afternoon, when all the rest of the forest 
is cast in shadow, these massive trunks will glow as 
though incandescent. The Trail, wonderful always, 
here seems to pass through the outer portals of the 
great flaming regions where dwell the risings and 
fallings of days. 

As you follow the Trail up, you will enter also the 
permanent dwelling-places of the seasons. With us 
each visits for the space of a few months, then steals 
away to give place to the next. Whither they go you 
have not known until you have traveled the high 
mountains. Summer lives in the valley; that you 
know. Then a little higher you are in the spring- 
time, even in August. Melting patches of snow 
linger under the heavy firs ; the earth is soggy with 
half-absorbed snow-water, trickling with exotic little 
rills that do not belong ; grasses of the year before 
float like drowned hair in pellucid pools with an air 
of permanence, except for the one fact ; fresh green 
things are sprouting bravely ; through bare branches 
trickles a shower of bursting buds, larger at the top, 
as though the Sower had in passing scattered them 
from above. Birds of extraordinary cheerfulness sing 
merrily to new and doubtful flowers. The air tastes 
cold, but the sun is warm. The great spring hum- 

107 



THE MOUNTAINS 

ming and promise is in the air. And a few thousand 
feet higher you wallow over the surface of drifts 
while a winter wind searches your bones. I used to 
think that Santa Claus dwelt at the North Pole. 
Now I am convinced that he has a workshop some- 
where among the great mountains where dwell the 
Seasons, and that his reindeer paw for grazing in the 
alpine meadows below the highest peaks. 

Here the birds migrate up and down instead of 
south and north. It must be a great saving of trouble 
to them, and undoubtedly those who have discovered 
it maintain toward the unenlightened the same de- 
lighted and fraternal secrecy with which you and I 
guard the knowledge of a good trout-stream. When 
you can migrate adequately in a single day, why 
spend a month at it % 

Also do I remember certain spruce woods with 
openings where the sun shone through. The shadows 
were very black, the sunlight very white. As I looked 
back I could see the pack-horses alternately suffer 
eclipse and illumination in a strange flickering man- 
ner good to behold. The dust of the trail eddied 
and billowed lazily in the sun, each mote flashing 
as though with life ; then abruptly as it crossed the 
sharp line of shade it disappeared. 

From these spruce woods, level as a floor, we came 
out on the rounded shoulder of a mountain to find 
ourselves nearly nine thousand feet above the sea. 
Below us was a deep canon to the middle of the 

1 08 



THE TRAIL 

earth. And spread in a semicircle about the curve 
of our mountain a most magnificent panoramic view. 
First there were the plains, represented by a brown 
haze of heat ; then, very remote, the foot-hills, the 
brush-hills, the pine mountains, the upper timber, 
the tremendous granite peaks, and finally the barrier 
of the main crest with its glittering snow. From the 
plains to that crest was over seventy miles. I should 
not dare say how far we could see down the length 
of the range ; nor even how distant was the other 
wall of the canon over which we rode. Certainly it 
was many miles ; and to reach the latter point con- 
sumed three days. 

It is useless to multiply instances. The principle 
is well enough established by these. Whatever im- 
pression of your trail you carry away will come from 
the little common occurrences of every day. That is 
true of all trails ; and equally so, it seems to me, of 
our Trail of Life sketched at the beginning of this 
essay. 

But the trail of the mountains means more than 
wonder; it means hard work. Unless you stick to 
the beaten path, where the freighters have lost so 
many mules that they have finally decided to fix 
things up a bit, you are due for lots of trouble. Bad 
places will come to be a nightmare with you and a 
topic of conversation with whomever you may meet. 
We once enjoyed the company of a prospector three 
days while he made up his mind to tackle a certain 

109 



THE MOUNTAINS 

bit of trail we had just descended. Our accounts did 
not encourage him. Every morning he used to squint 
up at the cliff which rose some four thousand feet 
above us. " Boys," he said finally as he started, " I 
may drop in on you later in the morning." I am 
happy to say he did not. 

The most discouraging to the tenderfoot, but in 
reality the safest of all bad trails, is the one that skirts 
a precipice. Your horse possesses a laudable desire 
to spare your inside leg unnecessary abrasion, so he 
walks on the extreme outer edge. If you watch the 
performance of the animal ahead, you will observe 
that every few moments his outer hind hoof slips off 
that edge, knocking little stones down into the abyss. 
Then you conclude that sundry slight jars you have 
been experiencing are from the same cause. Your 
peace of mind deserts you. You stare straight ahead, 
sit very light indeed, and perhaps turn the least bit 
sick. The horse, however, does not mind, nor will 
you, after a little. There is absolutely nothing to do 
but to sit steady and give your animal his head. In 
a fairly extended experience I never got off the edge 
but once. Then somebody shot a gun immediately 
ahead ; my horse tried to turn around, slipped, and 
slid backwards until he overhung the chasm. For- 
tunately his hind feet caught a tiny bush. He gave 
a mighty heave, and regained the trail. Afterwards 
I took a look and found that there were no more 
bushes for a hundred feet either way. 



THE TRAIL 

Next in terror to the unaccustomed is an ascent by 
lacets up a very steep side hill. The effect is cumu- 
lative. Each turn brings you one stage higher, adds 
definitely one more unit to the test of your hardi- 
hood. This last has not terrified you ; how about the 
next ? or the next ? or the one after that ? There is 
not the slightest danger. You appreciate this point 
after you have met head-on some old-timer. After 
you have speculated frantically how you are to pass 
him, he solves the problem by calmly turning his 
horse off the edge and sliding to the next lacet below. 
Then you see that with a mountain horse it does not 
much matter whether you get off such a trail or not. 

The real bad places are quite as likely to be on 
the level as on the slant. The tremendous granite 
slides, where the cliff has avalanched thousands of 
tons of loose jagged rock-fragments across the pass- 
age, are the worst. There your horse has to be a goat 
in balance. He must pick his way from the top of 
one fragment to the other, and if he slips into the 
interstices he probably breaks a leg. In some parts 
of the granite country are also smooth rock aprons 
where footing is especially difficult, and where often 
a slip on them means a toboggan chute off into space. 
I know of one spot where such an apron curves 
off the shoulder of the mountain. Your horse slides 
directly down it until his hoofs encounter a little 
crevice. Checking at this, he turns sharp to the left 
and so off to the good trail again. If he does not 



THE MOUNTAINS 

check at the little crevice, he slides on over the curve 
of the shoulder and lands too far down to bury. 

Loose rocks in numbers on a very steep and nar- 
row trail are always an abomination, and a numerous 
abomination at that. A horse slides, skates, slithers. 
It has always seemed to me that luck must count 
largely in such a place. When the animal treads on 
a loose round stone — as he does every step of the 
way — that stone is going to roll under him, and he 
is going to catch himself as the nature of that stone 
and the little gods of chance may will. Only further- 
more I have noticed that the really good horse keeps 
his feet, and the poor one tumbles. A judgmat- 
ical rider can help a great deal by the delicacy of his 
riding and the skill with which he uses his reins. Or 
better still, get off and walk. 

Another mean combination, especially on a slant, 
is six inches of snow over loose stones or small boul- 
ders. There you hope for divine favor and flounder 
ahead. There is one compensation ; the snow is soft 
to fall on. Boggy areas you must be able to gauge 
the depth of at a glance. And there are places, beau- 
tiful to behold, where a horse clambers up the least 
bit of an ascent, hits his pack against a projection, 
and is hurled into outer space. You must recognize 
these, for he will be busy with his feet. 

Some of the mountain rivers furnish pleasing after- 
noons of sport. They are deep and swift, and below 
the ford are rapids. If there is a fallen tree of any sort 



THE TRAIL 

across them, — remember the length of California 
trees, and do not despise the rivers, — you would 
better unpack, carry your goods across yourself, and 
swim the pack-horses. If the current is very bad, you 
can splice riatas, hitch one end to the horse and the 
other to a tree on the farther side, and start the com- 
bination. The animal is bound to swing across some- 
how. Generally you can drive them over loose. In 
swimming a horse from the saddle, start him well 
upstream to allow for the current, and never, never, 
never attempt to guide him by the bit. The Tender- 
foot tried that at Mono Creek and nearly drowned 
himself and Old Slob. You would better let him 
alone, as he probably knows more than you do. If 
you must guide him, do it by hitting the side of his 
head with the flat of your hand. 

Sometimes it is better that you swim. You can 
perform that feat by clinging to his mane on the 
downstream side ; but it will be easier both for you 
and him if you hang to his tail. Take my word for 
it, he will not kick you. 

Once in a blue moon you may be able to cross 
the whole outfit on logs. Such a log bridge spanned 
Granite Creek near the North Fork of the San Joa- 
quin at an elevation of about seven thousand feet. 
It was suspended a good twenty feet above the water, 
which boiled white in a most disconcerting manner 
through a gorge of rocks. If anything fell off that 
log it would be of no further value even to the 

"3 



THE MOUNTAINS 

curiosity seeker. We got over all the horses save 
Tunemah. He refused to consider it, nor did peace- 
ful argument win. As he was more or less of a fool, 
we did not take this as a reflection on our judgment, 
but culled cedar clubs. We beat him until we were 
ashamed. Then we put a slip-noose about his neck. 
The Tenderfoot and I stood on the log and heaved 
while Wes stood on the shore and pushed. Suddenly 
it occurred to me that if Tunemah made up his silly 
mind to come, he would probably do it all at once, 
in which case the Tenderfoot and I would have about 
as much show for life as fossil formations. I did n't 
say anything about it to the Tenderfoot, but I hitched 
my six-shooter around to the front, resolved to find 
out how good I was at wing-shooting horses. But 
Tunemah declared he would die for his convictions. 
" All right," said we, " die then," with the embellish- 
ment of profanity. So we stripped him naked, and 
stoned him into the raging stream, where he had one 
chance in three of coming through alive. He might 
as well be dead as on the other side of that stream. 
He won through, however, and now I believe he 'd 
tackle a tight rope. 

Of such is the Trail, of such its wonders, its plea- 
sures, its little comforts, its annoyances, its dangers. 
And when you are forced to draw your six-shooter 
to end mercifully the life of an animal that has served 
you faithfully, but that has fallen victim to the leg- 
breaking hazard of the way, then you know a little 

114 



THE TRAIL 

of its tragedy also. May you never know the greater 
tragedy when a man's life goes out, and you unable 
to help ! May always your trail lead through fine 
trees, green grasses, fragrant flowers, and pleasant 
waters ! 



"5 



ON SEEING DEER 



ON SEEING DEER 

ONCE I happened to be sitting out a dance with 
a tactful young girl of tender disposition who 
thought she should adapt her conversation to the 
one with whom she happened to be talking. There- 
fore she asked questions concerning out-of-doors. She 
knew nothing whatever about it, but she gave a very 
good imitation of one interested. For some occult 
reason people never seem to expect me to own even- 
ing clothes, or to know how to dance, or to be able 
to talk about anything civilized ; in fact, most of 
them appear disappointed that I do not pull off a 
war-jig in the middle of the drawing-room. 

This young girl selected deer as her topic. She 
mentioned liquid eyes, beautiful form, slender ears; 
she said "cute," and " darlings," and "perfect dears." 
Then she shuddered prettily. 

" And I don't see how you can ever bear to shoot 
them, Mr. White," she concluded. 

" You quarter the onions and slice them very thin," 
said I dreamily. " Then you take a little bacon fat 
you had left over from the flap-jacks and put it in 
the frying-pan. The frying-pan should be very hot. 
While the onions are frying, you must keep turning 

119 



THE MOUNTAINS 

them over with a fork. It 's rather difficult to get 
them all browned without burning some. I should 
broil the meat. A broiler is handy, but two willows, 
peeled and charred a little so the willow taste won't 
penetrate the meat, will do. Have the steak fairly- 
thick. Pepper and salt it thoroughly. Sear it well 
at first in order to keep the juices in ; then cook 
rather slowly. When it is done, put it on a hot 
plate and pour the browned onions, bacon fat and 
all, over it." 

" What are you talking about ? " she interrupted. 

" I 'm telling you why I can bear to shoot deer," 
said I. 

"But I don't see — " said she. 

" Don't you ? " said I. " Well ; suppose you 've 
been climbing a mountain late in the afternoon when 
the sun is on the other side of it. It is a mountain of 
big boulders, loose little stones, thorny bushes. The 
slightest misstep would send pebbles rattling, brush 
rustling ; but you have gone all the way without 
making that misstep. This is quite a feat. It means 
that you 've known all about every footstep you 've 
taken. That would be business enough for most 
people, would n't it? But in addition you 've man- 
aged to see everything on that side of the mountain 
— especially patches of brown. You 've seen lots of 
patches of brown, and you 've examined each one 
of them. Besides that, you 've heard lots of little rus- 
tlings, and you 've identified each one of them. To 

I20 



ON SEEING DEER 

do all these things well keys your nerves to a high 
tension, does n't it ? And then near the top you look 
up from your last noiseless step to see in the brush 
a very dim patch of brown. If you had n't been look- 
ing so hard, you surely would n't have made it out. 
Perhaps, if you 're not humble-minded, you may 
reflect that most people would n't have seen it at all. 
You whistle once sharply. The patch of brown 
defines itself. Your heart gives one big jump. You 
know that you have but the briefest moment, the 
tiniest fraction of time, to hold the white bead of 
your rifle motionless and to press the trigger. It has 
to be done very steadily, at that distance, — and you 
out of breath, with your nerves keyed high in the 
tension of such caution." 

" Now what are you talking about ? " she broke in 
helplessly. 

" Oh, did n't I mention it % " I asked, surprised. 
" I was telling you why I could bear to shoot 
deer." 

" Yes, but — " she began. 

" Of course not," I reassured her. " After all, it 's 
very simple. The reason I can bear to kill deer is 
because, to kill deer, you must accomplish a skillful 
elimination of the obvious." 

My young lady was evidently afraid of being con- 
sidered stupid ; and also convinced of her inability to 
understand what I was driving at. So she temporized 
in the manner of society. 

121 



THE MOUNTAINS 

" I see," she said, with an air of complete enlight- 
enment. 

Now of course she did not see. Nobody could 
see the force of that last remark without the grace of 
further explanation, and yet in the elimination of the 
obvious rests the whole secret of seeing deer in the 
woods. 

In traveling the trail you will notice two things : 
that a tenderfoot will habitually contemplate the 
horn of his saddle or the trail a few yards ahead 
of his horse's nose, with occasionally a look about at 
the landscape ; and the old-timer will be constantly 
searching the prospect with keen understanding eyes. 
Now in the occasional glances the tenderfoot takes, 
his perceptions have room for just so many impres- 
sions. When the number is filled out he sees nothing 
more. Naturally the obvious features of the land- 
scape supply the basis for these impressions. He sees 
the configuration of the mountains, the nature of their 
covering, the course of their ravines, first of all. Then 
if he looks more closely, there catches his eye an odd- 
shaped rock, a burned black stub, a flowering bush, 
or some such matter. Anything less striking in its 
appeal to the attention actually has not room for 
its recognition. In other words, supposing that a 
man has the natural ability to receive x visual impres- 
sions, the tenderfoot fills out his full capacity with 
the striking features of his surroundings. To be able 
to see anything more obscure in form or color, he 



ON SEEING DEER 

must naturally put aside from his attention some one 
or another of these obvious features. He can, for 
example, look for a particular kind of flower on a side 
hill only by refusing to see other kinds. 

If this is plain, then, go one step further in the 
logic of that reasoning. Put yourself in the mental 
attitude of a man looking for deer. His eye sweeps 
rapidly over a side hill ; so rapidly that you cannot 
understand how he can have gathered the main fea- 
tures of that hill, let alone concentrate and refine his 
attention to the seeing of an animal under a bush. 
As a matter of fact he pays no attention to the main 
features. He has trained his eye, not so much to see 
things, as to leave things out. The odd-shaped rock, 
the charred stub, the bright flowering bush do not 
exist for him. His eye passes over them as unseeing 
as yours over the patch of brown or gray that repre- 
sents his quarry. His attention stops on the unusual, 
just as does yours; only in his case the unusual is 
not the obvious. He has succeeded by long training 
in eliminating that. Therefore he sees deer where 
you do not. As soon as you can forget the naturally 
obvious and construct an artificially obvious, then you 
too will see deer. 

These animals are strangely invisible to the un- 
trained eye even when they are standing " in plain 
sight." You can look straight at them, and not see 
them at all. Then some old woodsman lets you sight 
over his finger exactly to the spot. At once the figure 

123 



THE MOUNTAINS 

of the deer fairly leaps into vision. I know of no 
more perfect example of the instantaneous than this. 
You are filled with astonishment that you could for 
a moment have avoided seeing it. And yet next time 
you will in all probability repeat just this " puzzle 
picture " experience. 

The Tenderfoot tried for six weeks before he 
caught sight of one. He wanted to very much. 
Time and again one or the other of us would hiss 
back, " See the deer ! over there by the yellow bush ! " 
but before he could bring the deliberation of his 
scrutiny to the point of identification, the deer would 
be gone. Once a fawn jumped fairly within ten feet 
of the pack-horses and went bounding away through 
the bushes, and that fawn he could not help seeing. 
We tried conscientiously enough to get him a shot ; 
but the Tenderfoot was unable to move through the 
brush less majestically than a Pullman car, so we had 
ended by becoming apathetic on the subject. 

Finally, while descending a very abrupt mountain- 
side I made out a buck lying down perhaps three 
hundred feet directly below us. The buck was not 
looking our way, so I had time to call the Tender- 
foot. He came. With difficulty and by using my 
rifle-barrel as a pointer I managed to show him the 
animal. Immediately he began to pant as though 
at the finish of a mile race, and his rifle, when he 
leveled it, covered a good half acre of ground. This 
would never do. 

124 



ON SEEING DEER 

" Hold on ! " I interrupted sharply. 

He lowered his weapon to stare at me wild-eyed. 

" What is it ^ " he gasped. 

" Stop a minute ! " I commanded. " Now take 
three deep breaths." 

He did so. 

" Now shoot," I advised, " and aim at his knees." 

The deer was now on his feet and facing us, so 
the Tenderfoot had the entire length of the animal 
to allow for lineal variation. He fired. The deer 
dropped. The Tenderfoot thrust his hat over one 
eye, rested hand on hip in a manner cocky to behold. 

" Simply slaughter ! " he proffered with lofty 
scorn. 

We descended. The bullet had broken the deer's 
back — about six inches from the tail. The Tender- 
foot had overshot by at least three feet. 

You will see many deer thus from the trail, — in 
fact, we kept up our meat supply from the saddle, 
as one might say, — but to enjoy the finer savor of 
seeing deer, you should start out definitely with that 
object in view. Thus you have opportunity for the 
display of a certain finer woodcraft. You must know 
where the objects of your search are likely to be found, 
and that depends on the time of year, the time of day, 
their age, their sex, a hundred little things. When 
the bucks carry antlers in the velvet, they frequent 
the inaccessibilities of the highest rocky peaks, so 
their tender horns may not be torn in the brush, but 

"5 



THE MOUNTAINS 

nevertheless so that the advantage of a lofty viewpoint 
may compensate for the loss of cover. Later you 
will find them in the open slopes of a lower altitude, 
fully exposed to the sun, that there the heat may 
harden the antlers. Later still, the heads in fine con- 
dition and tough to withstand scratches, they plunge 
into the dense thickets. But in the mean time the fer- 
tile does have sought a lower country with patches of 
small brush interspersed with open passages. There 
they can feed with their fawns, completely concealed, 
but able, by merely raising the head, to survey the 
entire landscape for the threatening of danger. The 
barren does, on the other hand, you will find through 
the timber and brush, for they are careless of all re- 
sponsibilities either to offspring or headgear. These 
are but a few of the considerations you will take into 
account, a very {ew of the many which lend the 
deer countries strange thrills of delight over new 
knowledge gained, over crafty expedients invented 
or well utilized, over the satisfactory matching of 
your reason, your instinct, your subtlety and skill 
against the reason, instinct, subtlety, and skill of one 
of the wariest of large wild animals. 

Perversely enough the times when you did not see 
deer are more apt to remain vivid in your memory 
than the times when you did. I can still see distinctly 
sundry wide jump-marks where the animal I was 
tracking had evidently caught sight of me and lit out 
before I came up to him. Equally, sundry little thin 

126 



ON SEEING DEER 

disappearing clouds of dust; cracklings of brush, 
growing ever more distant ; the tops of bushes wav- 
ing to the steady passage of something remaining 
persistently concealed, — these are the chief ingredi- 
ents often repeated which make up deer-stalking 
memory. When I think of seeing deer, these things 
automatically rise. 

A few of the deer actually seen do, however, stand 
out clearly from the many. When I was a very small 
boy possessed of a 32-20 rifle and large ambitions, 
I followed the advantage my father's footsteps made 
me in the deep snow of an unused logging-road. 
His attention was focused on some very interesting 
fresh tracks. I, being a small boy, cared not at all 
for tracks, and so saw a big doe emerge from the 
bushes not ten yards away, lope leisurely across the 
road, and disappear, wagging earnestly her tail. 
When I had recovered my breath I vehemently de- 
manded the sense of fooling with tracks when there 
were real live deer to be had. My father examined 
me. 

" Well, why did n't you shoot her *? " he inquired 
dryly. 

I had n't thought of that. 

In the spring of 1900 I was at the head of the 
Piant River waiting for the log-drive to start. One 
morning, happening to walk over a slashing of many 
years before in which had grown a strong thicket of 
white popples, I jumped a band of nine deer. I shall 

127 



THE MOUNTAINS 

never forget the bewildering impression made by the 
glancing, dodging, bouncing white of those nine 
snowy tails and rumps. 

But most wonderful of all was a great buck, of I 
should be afraid to say how many points, that stood 
silhouetted on the extreme end of a ridge high above 
our camp. The time was just after twilight, and as 
we watched, the sky lightened behind him in pro- 
phecy of the moon. 



128 



ON TENDERFEET 



XI 

ON TENDERFEET 

THE tenderfoot is a queer beast. He makes 
more trouble than ants at a picnic, more work 
than a trespassing goat; he never sees anything, 
knows where anything is, remembers accurately your 
instructions, follows them if remembered, or is able to 
handle without awkwardness his large and pathetic 
hands and feet ; he is always lost, always falling off 
or into things, always in difficulties; his articles of 
necessity are constantly being burned up or washed 
away or mislaid ; he looks at you beamingly through 
great innocent eyes in the most chuckle-headed of 
manners ; he exasperates you to within an inch of 
explosion, — and yet you love him. 

I am referring now to the real tenderfoot, the fellow 
who cannot learn, who is incapable ever of adjusting 
himself to the demands of the wild life. Sometimes 
a man is merely green, inexperienced. But give him 
a chance and he soon picks up the game. That is 
your greenhorn, not your tenderfoot. Down near 
Monache meadows we came across an individual lead- 
ing an old pack-mare up the trail. The first thing, he 
asked us to tell him where he was. We did so. Then 
we noticed that he carried his gun muzzle-up in his 

131 



THE MOUNTAINS 

hip-pocket, which seemed to be a nice way to shoot 
a hole in your hand, but a poor way to make your 
weapon accessible. He unpacked near us, and 
promptly turned the mare into a bog-hole because 
it looked green. Then he stood around the rest of 
the evening and talked deprecating talk of a garru- 
lous nature. k 

" Which way did you come ? " asked Wes. 

The stranger gave us a hazy account of misnamed 
canons, by which we gathered that he had come 
directly over the rough divide below us. 

"But if you wanted to get to Monache, why 
did n't you go around to the eastward through that 
pass, there, and save yourself all the climb *? It must 
have been pretty rough through there." 

" Yes, perhaps so," he hesitated. " Still — I got 
lots of time — I can take all summer, if I want to — 
and I 'd rather stick to a straight line — then you 
know where you are — if you get off the straight 
line, you 're likely to get lost, you know." 

We knew well enough what ailed him, of course. 
He was a tenderfoot, of the sort that always, to its 
dying day, unhobbles its horses before putting their 
halters on. Yet that man for thirty-two years had 
lived almost constantly in the wild countries. He 
had traveled more miles with a pack-train than we 
shall ever dream of traveling, and hardly could we 
mention a famous camp of the last quarter century 
that he had not blundered into. Moreover he proved 

132 



ON TENDERFEET 

by the indirections of his misinformation that he had 
really been there and was not making ghost stories 
in order to impress us. Yet if the Lord spares him 
thirty-two years more, at the end of that time he will 
probably still be carrying his gun upside down, turn- 
ing his horse into a bog-hole, and blundering through 
the country by main strength and awkwardness. He 
was a beautiful type of the tenderfoot. 

The redeeming point of the tenderfoot is his 
humbleness of spirit and his extreme good nature. 
He exasperates you with his fool performances to 
the point of dancing cursing wild crying rage, and 
then accepts your — well, reproofs — so meekly that 
you come off the boil as though some one had re- 
moved you from the fire, and you feel like a low- 
browed thug. 

Suppose your particular tenderfoot to be named 
Algernon. Suppose him to have packed his horse 
loosely — they always do — so that the pack has 
slipped, the horse has bucked over three square miles 
of assorted mountains, and the rest of the train is 
scattered over identically that area. You have run 
your saddle-horse to a lather heading the outfit. You 
have sworn and dodged and scrambled and yelled, 
even fired your six-shooter, to turn them and bunch 
them. In the mean time Algernon has either sat his 
horse like a park policeman in his leisure hours, 
or has ambled directly into your path of pursuit on 
an average of five times a minute. Then the trouble 

133 



THE MOUNTAINS 

dies from the landscape and the baby bewilderment 
from his eyes. You slip from your winded horse and 
address Algernon with elaborate courtesy. 

" My dear fellow," you remark, " did you not see 
that the thing for you to do was to head them down 
by the bottom of that little gulch there ? Don't you 
really think, anybody would have seen it? What in 
hades do you think I wanted to run my horse all 
through those boulders for ? Do you think I want 
to get him lame 'way up here in the hills *? I don't 
mind telling a man a thing once, but to tell it to 
him fifty-eight times and then have it do no good — 
Have you the faintest recollection of my instructing 
you to turn the bight over instead of under when you 
throw that pack-hitch ? If you 'd remember that, we 
should n't have had all this trouble." 

" You did n't tell me to head them by the little 
gulch," babbles Algernon. 

This is just the utterly fool reply that upsets your 
artificial and elaborate courtesy. You probably foam 
at the mouth, and dance on your hat, and shriek wild 
imploring imprecations to the astonished hills. This 
is not because you have an unfortunate disposition, 
but because Algernon has been doing precisely the 
same thing for two months. 

" Listen to him ! " you howl. "Didn't tell him! 
Why you gangle-legged bug-eyed soft-handed pop- 
eared tenderfoot, you ! there are some things you 
never think of telling a man. I never told you to 

134 



ON TENDERFEET 

open your mouth to spit, either. If you had a hired 
man at five dollars a year who was so all-around hope- 
lessly thick-headed and incompetent as you are, 
you 'd fire him to-morrow morning." 

Then Algernon looks truly sorry, and does n't 
answer back as he ought to in order to give occasion 
for the relief of a really soul-satisfying scrap, and 
utters the soft answer humbly. So your wrath is 
turned and there remain only the dregs which taste 
like some of Algernon's cooking. 

It is rather good fun to relieve the bitterness of 
the heart. Let me tell you a few more tales of the 
tenderfoot, premising always that I love him, and 
when at home seek him out to smoke pipes at his 
fireside, to yarn over the trail, to wonder how much 
rancor he cherishes against the maniacs who declaimed 
against him, and by way of compensation to build up 
in the mind of his sweetheart, his wife, or his mother 
a fearful and wonderful reputation for him as the 
Terror of the Trail. These tales are selected from 
many, mere samples of a varied experience. They 
occurred here, there, and everywhere, and at various 
times. Let no one try to lay them at the door of 
our Tenderfoot merely because such is his title in 
this narrative. We called him that by way of dis- 
tinction. 

Once upon a time some of us were engaged in 
climbing a mountain rising some five thousand feet 
above our starting-place. As we toiled along, one of 

*3S 



THE MOUNTAINS 

the pack-horses became impatient and pushed ahead. 
We did not mind that, especially, as long as she 
stayed in sight, but in a little while the trail was 
closed in by brush and timber. 

" Algernon," said we, "just push on and get ahead 
of that mare, will you *? " 

Algernon disappeared. We continued to climb. 
The trail was steep and rather bad. The labor was 
strenuous, and we checked off each thousand feet 
with thankfulness. As we saw nothing further of 
Algernon, we naturally concluded he had headed the 
mare and was continuing on the trail. Then through 
a little opening we saw him riding cheerfully along 
without a care to occupy his mind. Just for luck we 
hailed him. 

" Hi there, Algernon ! Did you find her? " 

" Have n't seen her yet." 

" Well, you 'd better push on a little faster. She 
may leave the trail at the summit." 

Then one of us, endowed by heaven with a keen 
intuitive instinct for tenderfeet, — no one could have 
a knowledge of them, they are too unexpected, — 
had an inspiration. 

" I suppose there are tracks on the trail ahead of 
you ? " he called. 

We stared at each other, then at the trail. Only 
one horse had preceded us, — that of the tenderfoot. 
But of course Algernon was nevertheless due for his 
chuckle-headed reply. 

136 



ON TENDERFEET 

" I have n't looked," said he. 

That raised the storm conventional to such an 
occasion. 

" What in the name of seventeen little dicky-birds 
did you think you were up to ! " we howled. " Were 
you going to ride ahead until dark in the childlike 
faith that that mare might show up somewhere ? 
Here 's a nice state of affairs. The trail is all tracked 
up now with our horses, and heaven knows whether 
she 's left tracks where she turned off. It may be 
rocky there." 

We tied the animals savagely, and started back on 
foot. It would be criminal to ask our saddle-horses 
to repeat that climb. Algernon we ordered to stay 
with them. 

" And don't stir from them no matter what hap- 
pens, or you '11 get lost," we commanded out of the 
wisdom of long experience. 

We climbed down the four thousand odd feet, 
and then back again, leading the mare. She had 
turned off not forty rods from where Algernon had 
taken up her pursuit. 

Your Algernon never does get down to little de- 
tails like tracks — his scheme of life is much too 
magnificent. To be sure he would not know fresh 
tracks from old if he should see them; so it is prob- 
ably quite as well. In the morning he goes out after 
the horses. The bunch he finds easily enough, but 
one is missing. What would you do about it ? You 

i37 



THE MOUNTAINS 

would naturally walk in a circle around the bunch 
until you crossed the track of the truant leading 
away from it, would n't you ? If you made a wide 
enough circle you would inevitably cross that track, 
would n't you ? provided the horse started out with 
the bunch in the first place. Then you would follow 
the track, catch the horse, and bring him back. Is 
this Algernon's procedure % Not any. " Ha ! " says 
he, " old Brownie is missing. I will hunt him up." 
Then he maunders off into the scenery, trusting to 
high heaven that he is going to blunder against 
Brownie as a prominent feature of the landscape. 
After a couple of hours you probably saddle up 
Brownie and go out to find the tenderfoot. 

He has a horrifying facility in losing himself. 
Nothing is more cheering than to arise from a hard- 
earned couch of ease for the purpose of trailing an 
Algernon or so through the gathering dusk to the 
spot where he has managed to find something — a 
very real despair of ever getting back to food and 
warmth. Nothing is more irritating then than his 
gratitude. 

I traveled once in the Black Hills with such a 
tenderfoot. We were off from the base of supplies 
for a ten days' trip with only a saddle-horse apiece. 
This was near first principles, as our total provisions 
consisted of two pounds of oatmeal, some tea, and 
sugar. Among other things we climbed Mt. Harney. 
The trail, after we left the horses, was as plain as a 

138 



ON TENDERFEET 

strip of Brussels carpet, but somehow or another 
that tenderfoot managed to get off it. I hunted him 
up. We gained the top, watched the sunset, and 
started down. The tenderfoot, I thought, was fairly 
at my coat-tails, but when I turned to speak to him 
he had gone ; he must have turned off at one of the 
numerous little openings in the brush. I sat down 
to wait. By and by, away down the west slope of 
the mountain, I heard a shot, and a faint, a very faint, 
despairing yell. I, also, shot and yelled. After vari- 
ous signals of the sort, it became evident that the 
tenderfoot was approaching. In a moment he tore by 
at full speed, his hat off, his eye wild, his six-shooter 
popping at every jump. He passed within six feet 
of me, and never saw me. Subsequently I left him 
on the prairie, with accurate and simple instructions. 

" There 's the mountain range. You simply keep 
that to your left and ride eight hours. Then you '11 
see Rapid City. You simply can't get lost. Those 
hills stick out like a sore thumb." 

Two days later he drifted into Rapid City, having 
wandered off somewhere to the east. How he had 
done it I can never guess. That is his secret. 

The tenderfoot is always in hard luck. Appar- 
ently, too, by all tests of analysis it is nothing but 
luck, pure chance, misfortune. And yet the very 
persistence of it in his case, where another escapes, 
perhaps indicates that much of what we call good 
luck is in reality unconscious skill in the arrange- 

J 39 



THE MOUNTAINS 

ment of those elements which go to make up events. 
A persistently unlucky man is perhaps sometimes 
to be pitied, but more often to be booted. That 
philosophy will be cryingly unjust about once in 
ten. 

But lucky or unlucky, the tenderfoot is human. 
Ordinarily that does n't occur to you. He is a male- 
volent engine of destruction — quite as impersonal 
as heat or cold or lack of water. He is an unfortu- 
nate article of personal belonging requiring much 
looking after to keep in order. He is a credulous 
and convenient response to practical jokes, huge 
tales, misinformation. He is a laudable object of 
attrition for the development of your character. But 
somehow, in the woods, he is not as other men, and 
so you do not come to feel yourself in close human 
relations to him. 

But Algernon is real, nevertheless. He has feel- 
ings, even if you do not respect them. He has his 
little enjoyments, even though he does rarely con- 
template anything but the horn of his saddle. 

" Algernon," you cry, " for heaven's sake stick 
that saddle of yours in a glass case and glut yourself 
with the sight of its ravishing beauties next winter. 
For the present do gaze on the mountains. That 's 
what you came for." 

No use. 

He has, doubtless, a full range of all the appreci- 
ative emotions, though from his actions you 'd never 

140 



ON TENDERFEET 

suspect it. Most human of all, he possesses his little 
vanities. 

Algernon always overdoes the equipment question. 
If it is bird-shooting, he accumulates leggings and 
canvas caps and belts and dog-whistles and things 
until he looks like a picture from a department-store 
catalogue. In the cow country he wears Stetson hats, 
snake bands, red handkerchiefs, six-shooters, chaps, 
and huge spurs that do not match his face. If it is 
yachting, he has a chronometer with a gong in the 
cabin of a five-ton sailboat, possesses a nickle-plated 
machine to register the heel of his craft, sports a 
brass-bound yachting-cap and all the regalia. This 
is merely amusing. But I never could understand 
his insane desire to get sunburned. A man will get 
sunburned fast enough ; he could not help it if he 
would. Algernon usually starts out from town with- 
out a hat. Then he dares not take off his sweater 
for a week lest it carry away his entire face. I have 
seen men with deep sores on their shoulders caused 
by nothing but excessive burning in the sun. This, 
too, is merely amusing. It means quite simply that 
Algernon realizes his inner deficiencies and wants to 
make up for them by the outward seeming. Be kind 
to him, for he has been raised a pet. 

The tenderfoot is lovable — mysterious in how he 
does it — and awfully unexpected. 



141 



THE CANON 



XII 

THE CANON 

ONE day we tied our horses to three bushes, and 
walked on foot two hundred yards. Then we 
looked down. 

It was nearly four thousand feet down. Do you 
realize how far that is ? There was a river meander- 
ing through olive-colored forests. It was so distant 
that it was light green and as narrow as a piece of 
tape. Here and there were rapids, but so remote that 
we could not distinguish the motion of them, only 
the color. The white resembled tiny dabs of cotton 
wool stuck on the tape. It turned and twisted, fol- 
lowing the turns and twists of the canon. Somehow 
the level at the bottom resembled less forests and 
meadows than a heavy and sluggish fluid like mo- 
lasses flowing between the canon walls. It emerged 
from the bend of a sheer cliff ten miles to eastward : 
it disappeared placidly around the bend of another 
sheer cliff an equal distance to the westward. 

The time was afternoon. As we watched, the 
shadow of the canon wall darkened the valley. 
Whereupon we looked up. 

Now the upper air, of which we were dwellers for 
the moment, was peopled by giants and clear atmo- 

i45 



THE MOUNTAINS 

sphere and glittering sunlight, flashing like silver 
and steel and precious stones from the granite domes, 
peaks, minarets, and palisades of" the High Sierras. 
Solid as they were in reality, in the crispness of this 
mountain air, under the tangible blue of this moun- 
tain sky, they seemed to poise light as so many bal- 
loons. Some of them rose sheer, with hardly a fissure; 
some had flung across their shoulders long trailing 
pine draperies, fine as fur; others matched mantles 
of the whitest white against the bluest blue of the 
sky. Towards the lower country were more pines 
rising in ridges, like the fur of an animal that has 
been alarmed. 

We dangled our feet over the edge and talked 
about it. Wes pointed to the upper end where the 
sluggish lava-like flow of the canon-bed first came 
into view. 

" That 's where we '11 camp," said he. 

" When ? " we asked. 

" When we get there," he answered. 

For this canon lies in the heart of the mountains. 
Those who would visit it have first to get into the 
country — a matter of over a week. Then they have 
their choice of three probabilities of destruction. 

The first route comprehends two final days of 
travel at an altitude of about ten thousand feet, where 
the snow lies in midsummer ; where there is no feed, 
no comfort, and the way is strewn with the bones of 
horses. This is known as the " Basin Trail." After 

146 



THE CANON 

taking it, you prefer the others — until you try 
them. 

The finish of the second route is directly over the 
summit of a mountain. You climb two thousand 
feet and then drop down five. The ascent is heart- 
breaking but safe. The descent is hair-raising and 
unsafe : no profanity can do justice to it. Out of a 
pack-train of thirty mules, nine were lost in the 
course of that five thousand feet. Legend has it that 
once many years ago certain prospectors took in a 
Chinese cook. At first the Mongolian bewailed his 
fate loudly and fluently, but later settled to a single 
terrified moan that sounded like " tu-ne-mah ! tu-ne- 
mah ! " The trail was therefore named the " Tu-ne- 
mah Trail." It is said that " tu-ne-mah " is the very 
worst single vituperation of which the Chinese lan- 
guage is capable. 

The third route is called " Hell's Half Mile." It is 
not misnamed. 

Thus like paradise the canon is guarded ; but 
like paradise it is wondrous in delight. For when 
you descend you find that the tape-wide trickle 
of water seen from above has become a river with 
profound darkling pools and placid stretches and 
swift dashing rapids ; that the dark green sluggish 
flow in the canon-bed has disintegrated into a noble 
forest with great pine-trees, and shaded aisles, and 
deep dank thickets, and brush openings where the 
sun is warm and the birds are cheerful, and groves 

i47 



THE MOUNTAINS 

of cotton woods where all day long softly, like snow, 
the flakes of cotton float down through the air. 
Moreover there are meadows, spacious lawns, open- 
ing out, closing in, winding here and there through 
the groves in the manner of spilled naphtha, actually 
waist high with green feed, sown with flowers like a 
brocade. Quaint tributary little brooks babble and 
murmur down through these trees, down through 
these lawns. A blessed warm sun hums with the joy 
of innumerable bees. To right hand and to left, 
in front of you and behind, rising sheer, forbidding, 
impregnable, the cliffs, mountains, and ranges hem 
you in. Down the river ten miles you can go : then 
the gorge closes, the river grows savage, you can only 
look down the tumbling fierce waters and turn back. 
Up the river five miles you can go, then interpose 
the sheer snow-clad cliffs of the Palisades, and them, 
rising a matter of fourteen thousand feet, you may 
not cross. You are shut in your paradise as com- 
pletely as though surrounded by iron bars. 

But, too, the world is shut out. The paradise is 
yours. In it are trout and deer and grouse and bear 
and lazy happy days. Your horses feed to the fat- 
ness of butter. You wander at will in the ample 
though definite limits of your domain. You lie on 
your back and examine dispassionately, with an 
interest entirely detached, the huge cliff-walls of the 
valley. Days slip by. Really, it needs at least an 
angel with a flaming sword to force you to move on. 



THE CANON 

We turned away from our view and addressed 
ourselves to the task of finding out just when we were 
going to get there. The first day we bobbed up and 
over innumerable little ridges of a few hundred feet 
elevation, crossed several streams, and skirted the 
wide bowl-like amphitheatre of a basin. The second 
day we climbed over things and finally ended in a 
small hanging park named Alpine Meadows, at an 
elevation of eight thousand five hundred feet. There 
we rested-over a day, camped under a single pine- 
tree, with the quick-growing mountain grasses thick 
about us, a semicircle of mountains on three sides, 
and the plunge into the canon on the other. As 
we needed meat, we spent part of the day in finding 
a deer. The rest of the time we watched idly for 
bear. 

Bears are great travelers. They will often go 
twenty miles overnight, apparently for the sheer 
delight of being on the move. Also are they exceed- 
ingly loath to expend unnecessary energy in getting 
to places, and they hate to go down steep hills. You 
see, their fore legs are short. Therefore they are 
skilled in the choice of easy routes through the 
mountains, and once having made the choice they 
stick to it until through certain narrow places on 
the route selected they have worn a trail as smooth 
as a garden-path. The old prospectors used quite 
occasionally to pick out the horse-passes by trust- 
ing in general to the bear migrations, and many a 

149 



THE MOUNTAINS 

well-traveled route of to-day is superimposed over 
the way-through picked out by old bruin long 
ago. 

Of such was our own trail. Therefore we kept 
our rifles at hand and our eyes open for a straggler. 
But none came, though we baited craftily with por- 
tions of our deer. All we gained was a rattlesnake, 
and he seemed a bit out of place so high up in the 
air. 

Mount Tunemah stood over against us, still 
twenty-two hundred feet above our elevation. We 
gazed on it sadly, for directly by its summit, and for 
five hours beyond, lay our trail, and evil of repu- 
tation was that trail beyond all others. The horses, 
as we bunched them in preparation for the packing, 
took on a new interest, for it was on the cards that 
the unpacking at evening would find some missing 
from the ranks. 

" Lily 's a goner, sure," said Wes. " I don't know 
how she 's got this far except by drunken man's luck. 
She '11 never make the Tunemah." 

"And Tunemah himself," pointed out the Ten- 
derfoot, naming his own fool horse ; " I see where I 
start in to walk." 

" Sort of a ' morituri te salutamur,' " said I. 

We climbed the two thousand two hundred feet, 
leading our saddle-horses to save their strength. 
Every twenty feet we rested, breathing heavily of 
the rarified air. Then at the top of the world we 

150 



THE CANON 

paused on the brink of nothing to tighten cinches, 
while the cold wind swept by us, the snow glittered 
in a sunlight become silvery like that of early April, 
and the giant peaks of the High Sierras lifted into a 
distance inconceivably remote, as though the horizon 
had been set back for their accommodation. 

To our left lay a windrow of snow such as you 
will see drifted into a sharp crest across a corner of 
your yard ; only this windrow was twenty feet high 
and packed solid by the sun, the wind, and the weight 
of its age. We climbed it and looked over directly 
into the eye of a round Alpine lake seven or eight 
hundred feet below. It was of an intense cobalt blue, 
a color to be seen only in these glacial bodies of 
water, deep and rich as the mantle of a merchant 
of Tyre. White ice floated in it. The savage fierce 
granite needles and knife-edges of the mountain crest 
hemmed it about. 

But this was temporizing, and we knew it. The 
first drop of the trail was so steep that we could flip 
a pebble to the first level of it, and so rough in its 
water-and-snow-gouged knuckles of rocks that it 
seemed that at the first step a horse must necessarily 
fall end over end. We made it successfully, how- 
ever, and breathed deep. Even Lily, by a miracle of 
lucky scrambling, did not even stumble. 

" Now she 's easy for a little ways," said Wes, 
" then we '11 get busy." 

When we " got busy " we took our guns in our 
'5 1 



THE MOUNTAINS 

hands to preserve them from a fall, and started in. 
Two more miracles saved Dinkey at two more places. 
We spent an hour at one spot, and finally built a 
new trail around it. Six times a minute we held our 
breaths and stood on tiptoe with anxiety, powerless 
to help, while the horse did his best. At the es- 
pecially bad places we checked them off one after 
another, congratulating ourselves on so much saved 
as each came across without accident. When there 
were no bad places, the trail was so extraordina- 
rily steep that we ahead were in constant dread of 
a horse's falling on us from behind, and our legs did 
become wearied to incipient paralysis by the con- 
stant stiff checking of the descent. Moreover every 
second or so one of the big loose stones with which 
the trail was cumbered would be dislodged and come 
bouncing down among us. We dodged and swore ; 
the horses kicked; we all feared for the integrity of 
our legs. The day was full of an intense nervous 
strain, an entire absorption in the precise present. 
We promptly forgot a difficulty as soon as we were 
by it : we had not time to think of those still ahead. 
All outside the insistence of the moment was blurred 
and unimportant, like a specialized focus, so I can- 
not tell you much about the scenery. The only out- 
side impression we received was that the canon floor 
was slowly rising to meet us. 

Then strangely enough, as it seemed, we stepped 
off to level ground. 

152 




Six times a minute we held our breaths 



THE CANON 

Our watches said half-past three. We had made 
five miles in a little under seven hours. 

Remained only the crossing of the river. This 
was no mean task, but we accomplished it lightly, 
searching out a ford. There were high grasses, and 
on the other side of them a grove of very tall cot- 
tonwoods, clean as a park. First of all we cooked 
things ; then we spread things ; then we lay on our 
backs and smoked things, our hands clasped back 
of our heads. We cocked ironical eyes at the sheer 
cliff of old Mount Tunemah, very much as a man 
would cock his eye at a tiger in a cage. 

Already the meat-hawks, the fluffy Canada jays, 
had found us out, and were prepared to swoop down 
boldly on whatever offered to their predatory skill. 
We had nothing for them yet, — there were no 
remains of the lunch, — but the fire-irons were out, 
and ribs of venison were roasting slowly over the 
coals in preparation for the evening meal. Directly 
opposite, visible through the lattice of the trees, were 
two huge mountain peaks, part of the wall that shut 
us in, over against us in a height we had not dared 
ascribe to the sky itself. By and by the shadow of 
these mountains rose on the westerly wall. It crept 
up at first slowly, extinguishing color ; afterwards 
more rapidly as the sun approached the horizon. 
The sunlight disappeared. A moment's gray inter- 
vened, and then the wonderful golden afterglow laid 
on the peaks its enchantment. Little by little that 

i53 



THE MOUNTAINS 

too faded, until at last, far away, through a rift in 
the ranks of the giants, but one remained gilded 
by the glory of a dream that continued with it after 
the others. Heretofore it had seemed to us an insig- 
nificant peak, apparently overtopped by many, but 
by this token we knew it to be the highest of them 
all. 

Then ensued another pause, as though to give the 
invisible scene-shifter time to accomplish his work, 
followed by a shower of evening coolness, that seemed 
to sift through the trees like a soft and gentle rain. 
We ate again by the flicker of the fire, dabbing a 
trifle uncertainly at the food, wondering at the dis- 
tant mountain on which the Day had made its final 
stand, shrinking a little before the stealthy dark that 
flowed down the canon in the manner of a heavy 
smoke. 

In the notch between the two huge mountains 
blazed a star, — accurately in the notch, like the 
front sight of a rifle sighted into the marvelous 
depths of space. Then the moon rose. 

First we knew of it when it touched the crest of 
our two mountains. The night has strange effects on 
the hills. A moment before they had menaced black 
and sullen against the sky, but at the touch of the 
moon their very substance seemed to dissolve, leaving 
in the upper atmosphere the airiest, most nebulous, 
fragile, ghostly simulacrums of themselves you could 
imagine in the realms of fairy-land. They seemed 

iS4 



THE CANON 

actually to float, to poise like cloud-shapes about to 
dissolve. And against them were cast the inky silhou- 
ettes of three fir-trees in the shadow near at hand. 

Down over the stones rolled the river, crying out 
to us with the voices of old accustomed friends in 
another wilderness. The winds rustled. 



i5S 



TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS 



XIII 
TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS 

AS I have said, a river flows through the canon. 
It is a very good river with some riffles that 
can be waded down to the edges of black pools 
or white chutes of water ; with appropriate big trees 
fallen slantwise into it to form deep holes ; and with 
hurrying smooth stretches of some breadth. In all of 
these various places are rainbow trout. 

There is no use fishing until late afternoon. The 
clear sun of the high altitudes searches out merci- 
lessly the bottom of the stream, throwing its minia- 
ture boulders, mountains, and valleys as plainly into 
relief as the buttes of Arizona at noon. Then the 
trout quite refuse. Here and there, if you walk far 
enough and climb hard enough over all sorts of ob- 
structions, you may discover a few spots shaded by 
big trees or rocks where you can pick up a half dozen 
fish; but it is slow work. When, however, the 
shadow of the two huge mountains feels its way 
across the stream, then, as though a signal had been 
given, the trout begin to rise. For an hour and a 
half there is noble sport indeed. 

The stream fairly swarmed with them, but of course 
some places were better than others. Near the upper 

l S9 



THE MOUNTAINS 

reaches the water boiled like seltzer around the base 
of a tremendous tree. There the pool was at least ten 
feet deep and shot with bubbles throughout the 
whole of its depth, but it was full of fish. They rose 
eagerly to your gyrating fly, — and took it away with 
them down to subaqueous chambers and passages 
among the roots of that tree. After which you broke 
your leader. Royal Coachman was the best lure, and 
therefore valuable exceedingly were Royal Coach- 
men. Whenever we lost one we lifted up our voices 
in lament, and went away from there, calling to mind 
that there were other pools, many other pools, free 
of obstruction and with fish in them. Yet such is the 
perversity of fishermen, we were back losing more 
Royal Coachmen the very next day. In all I man- 
aged to disengage just three rather small trout from 
that pool, and in return decorated their ancestral halls 
with festoons of leaders and the brilliance of many 
flies. 

Now this was foolishness. All you had to do was 
to walk through a grove of cottonwoods, over a 
brook, through another grove of pines, down a slop- 
ing meadow to where one of the gigantic pine-trees 
had obligingly spanned the current. You crossed 
that, traversed another meadow, broke through a 
thicket, slid down a steep grassy bank, and there you 
were. A great many years before a pine-tree had 
fallen across the current. Now its whitened skeleton 
lay there, opposing a barrier for about twenty-five 

160 



TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS 

feet out into the stream. Most of the water turned 
aside, of course, and boiled frantically around the end 
as though trying to catch up with the rest of the 
stream which had gone on without it, but some of it 
dived down under and came up on the other side. 
There, as though bewildered, it paused in an uneasy 
pool. Its constant action had excavated a very deep 
hole, the debris of which had formed a bar immedi- 
ately below. You waded out on the bar and cast along 
the length of the pine skeleton over the pool. 

If you were methodical, you first shortened your 
line, and began near the bank, gradually working 
out until you were casting forty-five feet to the very 
edge of the fast current. I know of nothing plea- 
santer for you to do. You see, the evening shadow 
was across the river, and a beautiful grass slope at your 
back. Over the way was a grove of trees whose birds 
were very busy because it was near their sunset, while 
towering over them were mountains, quite peaceful 
by way of contrast because their sunset was still far 
distant. The river was in a great hurry, and was talk- 
ing to itself like a man who has been detained and 
is now at last making up time to his important en- 
gagement. And from the deep black shadow beneath 
the pine skeleton, occasionally flashed white bodies 
that made concentric circles where they broke the 
surface of the water, and which fought you to a finish 
in the glory of battle. The casting was against the 
current, so your flies could rest but the briefest possible 

161 



THE MOUNTAINS 

moment on the surface of the stream. That moment 
was enough. Day after day you could catch your 
required number from an apparently inexhaustible 
supply. 

I might inform you further of the gorge down- 
stream, where you lie flat on your stomach ten feet 
above the river, and with one hand cautiously ex- 
tended over the edge cast accurately into the angle 
of the cliff. Then when you get your strike, you 
tow him downstream, clamber precariously to the 
water's level — still playing your fish — and there land 
him, — if he has accommodatingly stayed hooked. 
A three-pound fish will make you a lot of tribulation 
at this game. 

We lived on fish and venison, and had all we 
wanted. The bear-trails were plenty enough, and 
the signs were comparatively fresh, but at the time 
of our visit the animals themselves had gone over 
the mountains on some sort of a picnic. Grouse, 
too, were numerous in the popple thickets, and 
flushed much like our ruffed grouse of the East. 
They afforded first-rate wing-shooting for Sure-Pop, 
the little shot-gun. 

But these things occupied, after all, only a small 
part of every day. We had loads of time left. Of 
course we explored the valley up and down. That 
occupied two days. After that we became lazy. 
One always does in a permanent camp. So did 
the horses. Active — or rather restless interest in 

162 



TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS 

life seemed to die away. Neither we nor they had 
to rustle hard for food. They became fastidious 
in their choice, and at all times of day could be 
seen sauntering in Indian file from one part of the 
meadow to the other for the sole purpose apparently 
of cropping a half dozen indifferent mouthfuls. The 
rest of the time they roosted under trees, one hind 
leg relaxed, their eyes half closed, their ears wab- 
bling, the pictures of imbecile content. We were 
very much the same. 

Of course we had our outbursts of virtue. While 
under their influence we undertook vast works. 
But after their influence had died out, we found 
ourselves with said vast works on our hands, and 
so came to cursing ourselves and our fool spasms of 
industry. 

For instance, Wes and I decided to make buck- 
skin from the hide of the latest deer. We did not 
need the buckskin — we already had two in the 
pack. Our ordinary procedure would have been to 
dry the hide for future treatment by a Mexican, at a 
dollar a hide, when we should have returned home. 
But, as I said, we were afflicted by sporadic activity, 
and wanted to do something. 

We began with great ingenuity by constructing a 
graining-tool out of a table-knife. We bound it with 
rawhide, and encased it with wood, and wrapped it 
with cloth, and filed its edge square across, as is 
proper. After this we hunted out a very smooth, 

163 



THE MOUNTAINS 

barkless log, laid the hide across it, straddled it, and 
began graining. 

Graining is a delightful process. You grasp the 
tool by either end, hold the square edge at a certain 
angle, and push away from you mightily. A half- 
dozen pushes will remove a little patch of hair; 
twice as many more will scrape away half as much 
of the seal-brown grain, exposing the white of the 
hide. Then, if you want to, you can stop and estab- 
lish in your mind a definite proportion between the 
amount thus exposed, the area remaining unex- 
posed, and the muscular fatigue of these dozen and 
a half of mighty pushes. The proportion will be 
wrong. You have left out of account the fact that you 
are going to get almighty sick of the job ; that your 
arms and upper back are going to ache shrewdly 
before you are done ; and that as you go on it is going 
to be increasingly difficult to hold down the edges 
firmly enough to offer the required resistance to your 
knife. Besides — if you get careless — you '11 scrape 
too hard : hence little holes in the completed buck- 
skin. Also — if you get careless — you will probably 
leave the finest, tiniest shreds of grain, and each of 
them means a hard transparent spot in the product. 
Furthermore, once having started in on the job, you 
are like the little boy who caught the trolley: you 
cannot let go. It must be finished immediately, all 
at one heat, before the hide stiffens. 

Be it understood, your first enthusiasm has evap- 
164 



TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS 

orated, and you are thinking of fifty pleasant things 
you might just as well be doing. 

Next you revel in grease, — lard oil, if you have 
it ; if not, then lard, or the product of boiled brains. 
This you must rub into the skin. You rub it in 
until you suspect that your finger-nails have worn 
away, and you glisten to the elbows like an Eskimo 
cutting blubber. 

By the merciful arrangement of those who in- 
vented buckskin, this entitles you to a rest. You 
take it — for several days — until your conscience 
seizes you by the scruff of the neck. 

Then you transport gingerly that slippery, clammy, 
soggy, snaky, cold bundle of greasy horror to the 
bank of the creek, and there for endless hours you 
wash it. The grease is more reluctant to enter the 
stream than you are in the early morning. Your 
hands turn purple. The others go by on their way 
to the trout-pools, but you are chained to the stake. 

By and by you straighten your back with creaks, 
and walk home like a stiff old man, carrying your 
hide rid of all superfluous oil. Then if you are just 
learning how, your instructor examines the result. 

" That 's all right," says he cheerfully. " Now when 
it dries, it will be buckskin." 

That encourages you. It need not. For during 
the process of drying it must be your pastime con- 
stantly to pull and stretch at every square inch of 
that boundless skin in order to loosen all the fibres. 

165 



THE MOUNTAINS 

Otherwise it would dry as stiff as whalebone. Now 
there is nothing on earth that seems to 1r y slower 
than buckskin. You wear your fingers dc n to the 
first joints, and, wishing to preserve the remainder for 
future use, you carry the hide to your instructor. 

" Just beginning to dry nicely," says he. 

You go back and do it some more, putting the 
entire strength of your body, soul, and religious con- 
victions into the stretching of that buckskin. It looks 
as white as paper; and feels as soft and warm as the 
turf on a southern slope. Nevertheless your tyrant 
declares it will not do. 

" It looks dry, and it feels dry," says he, " but it 
is n't dry. Go to it ! " 

But at this point your outraged soul arches its back 
and bucks. You sneak off and roll up that piece of 
buckskin, and thrust it into the alforja. You know 
it is dry. Then with a deep sigh of relief you come 
out of prison into the clear, sane, lazy atmosphere of 
the camp. 

" Do you mean to tell me that there is any one 
chump enough to do that for a dollar a hide *? " you 
inquire. 

" Sure," say they. 

" Well, the Fool Killer is certainly behind on his 
dates," you conclude. 

About a week later one of your companions drags 
out of the alforja something crumpled that resembles 
in general appearance and texture a rusted five-gallon 

166 




Towards evening he sauntered in 



TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS 

coal-oil can that has been in a wreck. It is only im- 
perceptibly less stiff and angular and cast-iron than 
rawhide. 

" What is this *? " the discoverer inquires. 

Then quietly you go out and sit on a high place 
before recognition brings inevitable — and sickening 
— chaff. For you know it at a glance. It is your 
buckskin. 

Along about the middle of that century an old 
prospector with four burros descended the Basin 
Trail and went into camp just below us. Towards 
evening he sauntered in. 

I sincerely wish I could sketch this man for you 
just as he came down through the fire-lit trees. He 
was about six feet tall, very leanly built, with a 
weather-beaten face of mahogany on which was su- 
perimposed a sweeping mustache and beetling eye- 
brows. These had originally been brown, but the 
sun had bleached them almost white in remarkable 
contrast to his complexion. Eyes keen as sunlight 
twinkled far down beneath the shadows of the brows 
and a floppy old sombrero hat. The usual flannel 
shirt, waistcoat, mountain-boots, and six-shooter com- 
pleted the outfit. He might have been forty, but was 
probably nearer sixty years of age. 

" Howdy, boys," said he, and dropped to the fire- 
side, where he promptly annexed a coal for his pipe. 

We all greeted him, but gradually the talk fell 
to him and Wes. It was commonplace talk enough 

167 



THE MOUNTAINS 

from one point of view: taken in essence it was 
merely like the inquiry and answer of the civilized 
man as to another's itinerary — " Did you visit Flor- 
ence? Berlin? St. Petersburg?" — and then the 
comparing of impressions. Only here again that old 
familiar magic of unfamiliar names threw its glamour 
over the terse sentences. 

" Over beyond the Piute Monument," the old 
prospector explained, "down through the Inyo 
Range, a leetle north of Death Valley — " 

"Back in seventy-eight when I was up in Bay 
Horse Canon over by Lost River — " 

" Was you ever over in th' Panamit Mountains ? 
— North of th' Telescope Range? " — 

That was all there was to it, with long pauses for 
drawing at the pipes. Yet somehow in the aggregate 
that catalogue of names gradually established in the 
minds of us two who listened an impression of long 
years, of wide wilderness, of wandering far over the 
face of the earth. The old man had wintered here, 
summered a thousand miles away, made his strike 
at one end of the world, lost it somehow, and cheer- 
fully tried for a repetition of his luck at the other. 
I do not believe the possibility of wealth, though 
always of course in the background, was ever near 
enough his hope to be considered a motive for ac- 
tion. Rather was it a dream, remote, something to 
be gained to-morrow, but never to-day, like the medi- 
aeval Christian's idea of heaven. His interest was 

1 68 



TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS 

in the search. For that one could see in him a real 
enthusiasm. He had his smattering of theory, his 
very real empirical knowledge, and his superstitions, 
like all prospectors. So long as he could keep in 
grub, own a little train of burros, and lead the life 
he loved, he was happy. 

Perhaps one of the chief elements of this remark- 
able interest in the game rather than the prizes of it, 
was his desire to vindicate his guesses or his conclu- 
sions. He liked to predict to himself the outcome of 
his solitary operations, and then to prove that pre- 
diction through laborious days. His life was a gi- 
gantic game of solitaire. In fact, he mentioned a 
dozen of his claims many years apart which he had 
developed to a certain point, — " so I could see what 
they was," — and then abandoned in favor of fresher 
discoveries. He cherished the illusion that these were 
properties to whose completion some day he would 
return. But we knew better ; he had carried them to 
the point where the result was no longer in doubt, 
and then, like one who has no interest in playing on 
in an evidently prescribed order, had laid his cards 
on the table to begin a new game. 

This man was skilled in his profession; he had 
pursued it for thirty odd years ; he was frugal and 
industrious ; undoubtedly of his long series of dis- 
coveries a fair percentage were valuable and are pro- 
ducing-properties to-day. Yet he confessed his bank 
balance to be less than five hundred dollars. Why 

169 



THE MOUNTAINS 

was this % Simply and solely because he did not care. 
At heart it was entirely immaterial to him whether 
he ever owned a dollar above his expenses. When 
he sold his claims, he let them go easily, loath to 
bother himself with business details, eager to get 
away from the fuss and nuisance. The few hundred 
dollars he received he probably sunk in unproduct- 
ive mining work, or was fleeced out of in the towns. 
Then joyfully he turned back to his beloved moun- 
tains and the life of his slow deep delight and his 
pecking away before the open doors of fortune. By 
and by he would build himself a little cabin down 
in the lower pine mountains, where he would grow 
a white beard, putter with occult wilderness crafts, 
and smoke long contemplative hours in the sun be- 
fore his door. For tourists he would braid rawhide 
reins and quirts, or make buckskin. The jays and 
woodpeckers and Douglas squirrels would become 
fond of him. So he would be gathered to his fathers, 
a gentle old man whose life had been spent harm- 
lessly in the open. He had had his ideal to which 
blindly he reached ; he had in his indirect way con- 
tributed the fruits of his labor to mankind ; his re- 
compenses he had chosen according to his desires. 
When you consider these things, you perforce have 
to revise your first notion of him as a useless sort of 
old ruffian. As you come to know him better, you 
must love him for the kindliness, the simple honesty, 
the modesty, and charity that he seems to draw from 

170 



TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS 

his mountain environment. There are hundreds of 
him buried in the great canons of the West. 

Our prospector was a little uncertain as to his 
plans. Along toward autumn he intended to land at 
some reputed placers near Dinkey Creek. There 
might be something in that district. He thought he 
would take a look. In the mean time he was just 
poking up through the country — he and his jack- 
asses. Good way to spend the summer. Perhaps he 
might run across something 'most anywhere ; up 
near the top of that mountain opposite looked min- 
eralized. Didn't know but what he'd take a look 
at her to-morrow. 

He camped near us during three days. I never 
saw a more modest, self-effacing man. He seemed 
genuinely, childishly, almost helplessly interested in 
our fly-fishing, shooting, our bear-skins, and our 
travels. You would have thought from his demeanor 
— which was sincere and not in the least ironical — 
that he had never seen or heard anything quite like 
that before, and was struck with wonder at it. Yet 
he had cast flies before we were born, and shot even 
earlier than he had cast a fly, and was a very Ish- 
mael for travel. Rarely could you get an account of 
his own experiences, and then only in illustration 
of something else. 

" If you-all likes bear-hunting," said he, " you 
ought to get up in eastern Oregon. I summered 
there once. The only trouble is, the brush is thick 

171 



THE MOUNTAINS 

as hair. You 'most always have to bait them, or 
wait for them to come and drink. The brush is so 
small you ain't got much chance. I run onto a she- 
bear and cubs that way once. Did n't have nothin' 
but my six-shooter, and I met her within six foot." 

He stopped with an air of finality. 

" Well, what did you do ? " we asked. 

" Me *? " he inquired, surprised. " Oh, I just leaked 
out of th' landscape." 

He prospected the mountain opposite, loafed with 
us a little, and then decided that he must be going. 
About eight o'clock in the morning he passed us, 
hazing his burros, his tall, lean figure elastic in defi- 
ance of years. 

" So long, boys," he called ; " good luck ! " 

" So long," we responded heartily. " Be good to 
yourself." 

He plunged into the river without hesitation, 
emerged dripping on the other side, and disappeared 
in the brush. From time to time during the rest 
of the morning we heard the intermittent tinkling of 
his bell-animal rising higher and higher above us on 
the trail. 

In the person of this man we gained our first con- 
nection, so to speak, with the Golden Trout. He 
had caught some of them, and could tell us of their 
habits. 

Few fishermen west of the Rockies have not heard 
of the Golden Trout, though, equally, few have 

172 



TROUT, BUCKSKIN, AND PROSPECTORS 

much definite information concerning it. Such infor- 
mation usually runs about as follows : 

It is a medium size fish of the true trout family, 
resembling a rainbow except that it is of a rich 
golden color. The peculiarity that makes its capture 
a dream to be dreamed of is that it swims in but one 
little stream of all the round globe. If you would 
catch a Golden Trout, you must climb up under the 
very base of the end of the High Sierras. There is 
born a stream that flows down from an elevation of 
about ten thousand feet to about eight thousand be- 
fore it takes a long plunge into a branch of the Kern 
River. Over the twenty miles of its course you can 
cast your fly for Golden Trout ; but what is the na- 
ture of that stream, that fish, or the method of its 
capture, few can tell you with any pretense of accu- 
racy. 

To be sure, there are legends. One, particularly 
striking, claims that the Golden Trout occurs in one 
other stream — situated in Central Asia ! — and that 
the fish is therefore a remnant of some pre-glacial 
period, like Sequoia trees, a sort of grand-daddy of 
all trout, as it were. This is but a sample of what 
you will hear discussed. 

Of course from the very start we had had our eye 
on the Golden Trout, and intended sooner or later 
to work our way to his habitat. Our prospector had 
just come from there. 

"It's about four weeks south, the way you and 
i73 



THE MOUNTAINS 

me travels," said he. " You don't want to try Har- 
rison's Pass ; it 's chock full of tribulation. Go 
around by way of the Giant Forest. She 's pretty 
good there, too, some sizable timber. Then over by 
Redwood Meadows, and Timber Gap, by Mineral 
King, and over through Farewell Gap. You turn 
east there, on a new trail. She 's steeper than straight- 
up-an'-down, but shorter than the other. When you 
get down in the canon of Kern River, — say, she 's a 
fine canon, too, — you want to go downstream about 
two mile to where there 's a sort of natural over- 
flowed lake full of stubs stickin' up. You '11 get 
some awful big rainbows in there. Then your best 
way is to go right up Whitney Creek Trail to a big 
high meadows mighty nigh to timber-line. That 's 
where I camped. They 's lots of them little yaller 
fish there. Oh, they bite well enough. You '11 catch 
'em. They 's a little shy." 

So in that guise — as the desire for new and dis- 
tant things — did our angel with the flaming sword 
finally come to us. 

We caught reluctant horses reluctantly. All the 
first day was to be a climb. We knew it ; and I 
suspect that they knew it too. Then we packed 
and addressed ourselves to the task offered us by 
the Basin Trail. 



i74 



ON CAMP COOKERY 



XIV 
ON CAMP COOKERY 

ONE morning I awoke a little before the others, 
and lay on my back staring up through the 
trees. It was not my day to cook. We were camped 
at the time only about sixty-five hundred feet high, 
and the weather was warm. Every sort of green thing 
grew very lush all about us, but our own little space 
was held dry and clear for us by the needles of two 
enormous red cedars some four feet in diameter. A 
variety of thoughts sifted through my mind as it fol- 
lowed lazily the shimmering filaments of loose spider- 
web streaming through space. The last thought stuck. 
It was that that day was a holiday. Therefore I un- 
limbered my six-shooter, and turned her loose, each 
shot being accompanied by a meritorious yell. 

The outfit boiled out of its blankets. I explained 
the situation, and after they had had some breakfast 
they agreed with me that a celebration was in order. 
Unanimously we decided to make it gastronomic. 

" We will ride till we get to good feed," we con- 
cluded, " and then we '11 cook all the afternoon. 
And nobody must eat anything until the whole busi- 
ness is prepared and served." 

It was agreed. We rode until we were very 
177 



THE MOUNTAINS 

hungry, which was eleven o'clock. Then we rode 
some more. By and by we came to a log cabin in a 
wide fair lawn below a high mountain with a ducal 
coronet on its top, and around that cabin was a fence, 
and inside the fence a man chopping wood. Him we 
hailed. He came to the fence and grinned at us from 
the elevation of high-heeled boots. By this token we 
knew him for a cow-puncher. 

" How are you *? " said we. 

" Howdy, boys," he roared. Roared is the accurate 
expression. He was not a large man, and his hair 
was sandy, and his eye mild blue. But undoubtedly 
his kinsmen were dumb and he had as birthright the 
voice for the entire family. It had been subsequently 
developed in the shouting after the wild cattle of the 
hills. Now his ordinary conversational tone was that 
of the announcer at a circus. But his heart was good. 

" Can we camp here ? " we inquired. 

" Sure thing," he bellowed. " Turn your horses 
into the meadow. Camp right here." 

But with the vision of a rounded wooded knoll a 
few hundred yards distant we said we 'd just get out 
of his way a little. We crossed a creek, mounted an 
easy slope to the top of the knoll, and were delighted 
to observe just below its summit the peculiar fresh 
green hump which indicates a spring. The Tender- 
foot, however, knew nothing of springs, for shortly 
he trudged a weary way back to the creek, and so 
returned bearing kettles of water. This performance 

178 



ON CAMP COOKERY 

hugely astonished the cowb'oy, who subsequently 
wanted to know if a " critter had died in the spring." 

Vv es departed to borrow a big Dutch oven of the 
man and to invite him to come across when we raised 
the long yell. Then we began operations. 

Now camp cooks are of two sorts. Anybody can 
with a little practice fry bacon, steak, or flapjacks, and 
boil coffee. The reduction of the raw material to its 
most obvious cooked result is within the reach of all 
but the most hopeless tenderfoot who never knows 
the salt-sack from the sugar-sack. But your true artist 
at the business is he who can from six ingredients, by 
permutation, combination, and the genius that is in 
him turn out a full score of dishes. For simple ex- 
ample : Given, rice, oatmeal, and raisins. Your expert 
accomplishes the following : 

Item — Boiled rice. 

Item — Boiled oatmeal. 

Item — Rice boiled until soft, then stiffened by the 
addition of quarter as much oatmeal. 

Item — Oatmeal in which is boiled almost to the 
dissolving point a third as much rice. 

These latter two dishes taste entirely unlike each 
other or their separate ingredients. They are more- 
over great in nutrition. 

Item — Boiled rice and raisins. 

Item — Dish number three with raisins. 

Item — Rice boiled with raisins, sugar sprinkled on 
top, and then baked. 

179 



THE MOUNTAINS 

Item — Ditto with dish number three. 

All these are good — and different. 

Some people like to cook and have a natural knack 
for it. Others hate it. If you are one of the former, 
select a propitious moment to suggest that you will 
cook, if the rest will wash the dishes and supply the 
wood and water. Thus you will get first crack at the 
fire in the chill of morning; and at night you can 
squat on your heels doing light labor while the others 
rustle. 

In a mountain trip small stout bags for the pro- 
visions are necessary. They should be big enough to 
contain, say, five pounds of corn-meal, and should tie 
firmly at the top. It will be absolutely labor lost for 
you to mark them on the outside, as the outside soon 
will become uniform in color with your marking. 
Tags might do, if occasionally renewed. But if you 
have the instinct, you will soon come to recognize 
the appearance of the different bags as you recognize 
the features of your family. They should contain 
small quantities for immediate use of the provisions 
the main stock of which is carried on another pack- 
animal. One tin plate apiece and " one to grow on " ; 
the same of tin cups ; half a dozen spoons ; four 
knives and forks ; a big spoon ; two frying-pans ; a 
broiler ; a coffee-pot ; a Dutch oven ; and three light 
sheet-iron pails to nest in one another was what we car- 
ried on this trip. You see, we had horses. Of course 
in the woods that outfit would be materially reduced. 

180 



ON CAMP COOKERY 

For the same reason, since we had our carrying 
done for us, we took along two flat iron bars about 
twenty-four inches in length. These, laid across two 
stones between which the fire had been built, we 
used to support our cooking-utensils stove-wise. I 
should never carry a stove. This arrangement is 
quite as effective, and possesses the added advantage 
that wood does not have to be cut for it of any de- 
finite length. Again, in the woods these iron bars 
would be a senseless burden. But early you will 
learn that while it is foolish to carry a single ounce 
more than will pay in comfort or convenience for its 
own transportation, it is equally foolish to refuse the 
comforts or conveniences that modified circumstance 
will permit you. To carry only a forest equipment 
with pack-animals would be as silly as to carry only 
a pack-animal outfit on a Pullman car. Only look 
out that you do not reverse it. 

Even if you do not intend to wash dishes, bring 
along some "Gold Dust." It is much simpler in 
getting at odd corners of obstinate kettles than any 
soap. All you have to do is to boil some of it in 
that kettle, and the utensil is tamed at once. 

That 's about all you, as expert cook, are going to 
need in the way of equipment. Now as to your 
fire. 

There are a number of ways of building a cook- 
ing fire, but they share one first requisite : it should 
be small. A blaze will burn everything, including 

181 



THE MOUNTAINS 

your hands and your temper. Two logs laid side by 
side and slanted towards each other so that small 
things can go on the narrow end and big things on 
the wide end ; flat rocks arranged in the same man- 
ner ; a narrow trench in which the fire is built ; and 
the flat irons just described — these are the best- 
known methods. Use dry wood. Arrange to do 
your boiling first — in the flame ; and your frying 
and broiling last — after the flames have died to 
coals. 

So much in general. You must remember that 
open-air cooking is in many things quite different 
from indoor cooking. You have different utensils, 
are exposed to varying temperatures, are limited in 
resources, and pursued by a necessity of haste. Pre- 
conceived notions must go by the board. You are 
after results ; and if you get them, do not mind the 
feminines of your household lifting the hands of hor- 
ror over the unorthodox means. Mighty few women 
I have ever seen were good camp-fire cooks; not 
because camp-fire cookery is especially difficult, but 
because they are temperamentally incapable of rid- 
ding themselves of the notion that certain things 
should be done in a certain way, and because if an 
ingredient lacks, they cannot bring themselves to 
substitute an approximation. They would rather 
abandon the dish than do violence to the sacred 
art. 

Most camp-cookery advice is quite useless for the 
182 




Camp cookery 



ON CAMP COOKERY 

same reason. I have seen many a recipe begin with 
the words : " Take the yolks of four eggs, half a 
cup of butter, and a cup of fresh milk — " As if 
any one really camping in the wilderness ever had 
eggs, butter, and milk ! 

Now here is something I cooked for this particu- 
lar celebration. Every woman to whom I have ever 
described it has informed me vehemently that it is 
not cake, and must be " horrid." Perhaps it is not 
cake, but it looks yellow and light, and tastes like 
cake. 

First I took two cups of flour, and a half cup of 
corn-meal to make it look yellow. In this I mixed 
a lot of baking-powder, — about twice what one 
should use for bread, — and topped off with a cup of 
sugar. The whole I mixed with water into a light 
dough. Into the dough went raisins that had previ- 
ously been boiled to swell them up. Thus was the 
cake mixed. Now I poured half the dough into the 
Dutch oven, sprinkled it with a good layer of sugar, 
cinnamon, and unboiled raisins; poured in the rest 
of the dough; repeated the layer of sugar, cinna- 
mon, and raisins ; and baked in the Dutch oven. It 
was gorgeous, and we ate it at one fell swoop. 

While we are about it, we may as well work back- 
wards on this particular orgy by describing the rest 
of our dessert. In addition to the cake and some 
stewed apricots, I, as cook of the day, constructed 
also a pudding. 

183 



THE MOUNTAINS 

The basis was flour — two cups of it. Into this I 
dumped a handful of raisins, a tablespoonful of bak- 
ing-powder, two of sugar, and about a pound of fat 
salt pork cut into little cubes. This I mixed up into 
a mess by means of a cup or so of water and a 
quantity of larrupy-dope. 1 Then I dipped a flour- 
sack in hot water, wrung it out, sprinkled it with 
dry flour, and half filled it with my pudding mix- 
ture. The whole outfit I boiled for two hours in a 
kettle. It, too, was good to the palate, and was even 
better sliced and fried the following morning. 

This brings us to the suspension of kettles. There 
are two ways. If you are in a hurry, cut a springy 
pole, sharpen one end, and stick it perpendicular in 
the ground. Bend it down towards your fire. Hang 
your kettle on the end of it. If you have jabbed it 
far enough into the ground in the first place, it will 
balance nicely by its own spring and the elasticity 
of the turf. The other method is to plant two forked 
sticks on either side your fire over which a strong 
cross-piece is laid. The kettles are hung on hooks 
cut from forked branches. The forked branches are 
attached to the cross-piece by means of thongs or 
withes. 

On this occasion we had deer, grouse, and ducks 
in the larder. The best way to treat them is as fol- 
lows. You may be sure we adopted the best way. 

When your deer is fresh, you will enjoy greatly a 

1 Camp-lingo for any kind of syrup. 
184 



ON CAMP COOKERY 

dish of liver and bacon. Only the liver you will dis- 
cover to be a great deal tenderer and more delicate 
than any calf's liver you ever ate. There is this dif- 
ference : a deer's liver should be parboiled in order 
to get rid of a green bitter scum that will rise to the 
surface and which you must skim off. 

Next in order is the " back strap " and tenderloin, 
which is always tender, even when fresh. The hams 
should be kept at least five days. Deer-steak, to my 
notion, is best broiled, though occasionally it is plea- 
sant by way of variety to fry it. In that case a brown 
gravy is made by thoroughly heating flour in the 
grease, and then stirring in water. Deer-steak threaded 
on switches and " barbecued " over the coals is deli- 
cious. The outside will be a little blackened, but all 
the juices will be retained. To enjoy this to the ut- 
most you should take it in your fingers and gnaw. 
The only permissible implement is your hunting- 
knife. Do not forget to peel and char slightly the 
switches on which you thread the meat ; otherwise 
they will impart their fresh-wood taste. 

By this time the ribs are in condition. Cut little 
slits between them, and through the slits thread in and 
out long strips of bacon. Cut other little gashes, and 
fill these gashes with onions chopped very fine. 
Suspend the ribs across two stones between which 
you have allowed a fire to die down to coals. 

There remain now the hams, shoulders, and heart. 
The two former furnish steaks. The latter you will 

185 



THE MOUNTAINS 

make into a " bouillon." Here inserts itself quite 
naturally the philosophy of boiling meat. It may be 
stated in a paragraph. 

If you want boiled meat, put it in hot water. That 
sets the juices. If you want soup, put it in cold water 
and bring to a boil. That sets free the juices. Re- 
member this. 

Now you start your bouillon cold. Into a kettle 
of water put your deer hearts, or your fish, a chunk 
of pork, and some salt. Bring to a boil. Next drop 
in quartered potatoes, several small whole onions, a 
half cupful of rice, a can of tomatoes — if you have 
any. Boil slowly for an hour or so — until things 
pierce easily under the fork. Add several chunks of 
bread and a little flour for thickening. Boil down to 
about a chowder consistency, and serve hot. It is all 
you will need for that meal ; and you will eat of it 
until there is no more. 

I am supposing throughout that you know enough 
to use salt and pepper when needed. 

So much for your deer. The grouse you can split 
and fry; in which case the brown gravy described 
for the fried deer-steak is just the thing. Or you can 
boil him. If you do that, put him into hot water, 
boil slowly, skim frequently, and add dumplings 
mixed of flour, baking-powder, and a little lard. Or 
you can roast him in your Dutch oven with your 
ducks. 

Perhaps it might be well here to explain the Dutch 
186 



ON CAMP COOKERY 

oven. It is a heavy iron kettle with little legs and 
an iron cover. The theory of it is that coals go among 
the little legs and on top of the iron cover. This heats 
the inside, and so cooking results. That, you will 
observe, is the theory. 

In practice you will have to remember a good 
many things. In the first place, while other affairs are 
preparing, lay the cover on the fire to heat it through ; 
but not on too hot a place nor too long, lest it warp 
and so fit loosely. Also the oven itself is to be heated 
through, and well greased. Your first baking will 
undoubtedly be burned on the bottom. It is almost 
impossible without many trials to understand just how 
little heat suffices underneath. Sometimes it seems 
that the warmed earth where the fire has been is 
enough. And on top you do not want a bonfire. A 
nice even heat, and patience, are the proper ingredi- 
ents. Nor drop into the error of letting your bread 
chill, and so fall to unpalatable heaviness. Probably 
for some time you will alternate between the extremes 
of heavy crusts with doughy insides, and white 
weighty boiler-plate with no distinguishable crusts at 
all. Above all, do not lift the lid too often for the 
sake of taking a look. Have faith. 

There are other ways of baking bread. In the North 
Country forests, where you carry everything on your 
back, you will do it in the frying-pan. The mixture 
should be a rather thick batter or a rather thin dough. 
It is turned into the frying-pan and baked first on one 

187 



THE MOUNTAINS 

side, then on the other, the pan being propped on 
edge facing the fire. The whole secret of success is 
first to set your pan horizontal and about three feet 
from the fire in order that the mixture may be thor- 
oughly warmed — not heated — before the pan is 
propped on edge. Still another way of baking is in 
a reflector oven of tin. This is highly satisfactory, 
provided the oven is built on the scientific angles to 
throw the heat evenly on all parts of the bread-pan 
and equally on top and bottom. It is not so easy as 
you might imagine to get a good one made. These 
reflectors are all right for a permanent camp, but too 
fragile for transportation on pack-animals. 

As for bread, try it unleavened once in a while by 
way of change. It is really very good, — just salt, 
water, flour, and a very little sugar. For those who 
like their bread " all crust," it is especially toothsome. 
The usual camp bread that I have found the most 
successful has been in the proportion of two cups of 
flour to a teaspoonful of salt, one of sugar, and three 
of baking-powder. Sugar or cinnamon sprinkled on 
top is sometimes pleasant. Test by thrusting a splinter 
into the loaf. If dough adheres to the wood, the 
bread is not done. Biscuits are made by using twice 
as much baking-powder and about two tablespoonfuls 
of lard for shortening. They bake much more quickly 
than the bread. Johnny-cake you mix of corn-meal 
three cups, flour one cup, sugar four spoonfuls, salt 
one spoonful, baking-powder four spoonfuls, and lard 

1 88 



ON CAMP COOKERY 

twice as much as for biscuits. It also is good, very 
good. 

The flapjack is first cousin to bread, very palatable, 
and extremely indigestible when made of flour, as is 
ordinarily done. However, the self-raising buckwheat 
flour makes an excellent flapjack, which is likewise 
good for your insides. The batter is rather thin, is 
poured into the piping hot greased pan, " flipped " 
when brown on one side, and eaten with larrupy-dope 
or brown gravy. 

When you come to consider potatoes and beans 
and onions and such matters, remember one thing : 
that in the higher altitudes water boils at a low tem- 
perature, and that therefore you must not expect your 
boiled food to cook very rapidly. In fact, you 'd bet- 
ter leave beans at home. We did. Potatoes you can 
sometimes tease along by quartering them. 

Rolled oats are better than oatmeal. Put them in 
plenty of water and boil down to the desired consist- 
ency. In lack of cream you will probably want it 
rather soft. 

Put your coffee into cold water, bring to a boil, let 
boil for about two minutes, and immediately set off. 
Settle by letting a half cup of cold water flow slowly 
into the pot from the height of a foot or so. If your 
utensils are clean, you will surely have good coffee 
by this simple method. Of course you will never 
boil your tea. 

The sun was nearly down when we raised our 
189 



THE MOUNTAINS 

long yell. The cow-puncher promptly responded. 
We ate. Then we smoked. Then we basely left all 
our dishes until the morrow, and followed our cow- 
puncher to his log cabin, where we were to spend 
the evening. 

By now it was dark, and a bitter cold swooped 
down from the mountains. We built a fire in a huge 
stone fireplace and sat around in the flickering light 
telling ghost-stories to one another. The place was 
rudely furnished, with only a hard earthen floor, and 
chairs hewn by the axe. Rifles, spurs, bits, revolvers, 
branding-irons in turn caught the light and vanished 
in the shadow. The skin of a bear looked at us from 
hollow eye-sockets in which there were no eyes. We 
talked of the Long Trail. Outside the wind, rising, 
howled through the shakes of the roof. 



190 



ON THE WIND AT NIGHT 



XV 
ON THE WIND AT NIGHT 

THE winds were indeed abroad that night. They 
rattled our cabin, they shrieked in our eaves, 
they puffed down our chimney, scattering the ashes 
and leaving in the room a balloon of smoke as though 
a shell had burst. When we opened the door and 
stepped out, after our good-nights had been said, it 
caught at our hats and garments as though it had 
been lying in wait for us. 

To our eyes, fire-dazzled, the night seemed very 
dark. There would be a moon later, but at present 
even the stars seemed only so many pinpoints of 
dull metal, lustreless, without illumination. We felt 
our way to camp, conscious of the softness of grasses, 
the uncertainty of stones. 

At camp the remains of the fire crouched beneath 
the rating of the storm. Its embers glowed sullen 
and red, alternately glaring with a half-formed resolu- 
tion to rebel, and dying to a sulky resignation. Once 
a feeble flame sprang up for an instant, but was im- 
mediately pounced on and beaten flat as though by 
a vigilant antagonist. 

We, stumbling, gathered again our tumbled blan- 
kets. Across the brow of the knoll lay a huge pine 

i93 



THE MOUNTAINS 

trunk. In its shelter we respread our bedding, and 
there, standing, dressed for the night. The power o{ 
the wind tugged at our loose garments, hoping for 
spoil. A towel, shaken by accident from the interior 
of a sweater, departed white-winged, like a bird, into 
the outer blackness. We found it next day caught 
in the bushes several hundred yards distant. Our 
voices as we shouted were snatched from our lips 
and hurled lavishly into space. The very breath of 
our bodies seemed driven back, so that as we faced 
the elements, we breathed in gasps, with difficulty. 

Then we dropped down into our blankets. 

At once the prostrate tree-trunk gave us its pro- 
tection. We lay in a little back-wash of the racing 
winds, still as a night in June. Over us roared the 
battle. We felt like sharpshooters in the trenches; 
as though, were we to raise our heads, at that instant 
we should enter a zone of danger. So we lay quietly 
on our backs and stared at the heavens. 

The first impression thence given was of stars 
sailing serene and unaffected, remote from the tur- 
bulence of what until this instant had seemed to fill 
the universe. They were as always, just as we should 
see them when the evening was warm and the tree- 
toads chirped clearly audible at half a mile. The 
importance of the tempest shrank. Then below them 
next we noticed the mountains; they too were serene 
and calm. 

Immediately it was as though the storm were an 
194 



ON THE WIND AT NIGHT 

hallucination; something not objective; something 
real, but within the soul of him who looked upon it. 
It. claimed sudden kinship with those blackest days 
when nevertheless the sun, the mere external unim- 
portant sun, shines with superlative brilliancy. Emo- 
tions of a power to shake the foundations of life 
seemed vaguely to stir in answer to these their hollow 
symbols. For after all, we were contented at heart 
and tranquil in mind, and this was but the outer 
gorgeous show of an intense emotional experience 
we did not at the moment prove. Our nerves re- 
sponded to it automatically. We became excited, 
keyed to a high tension, and so lay rigid on our 
backs, as though fighting out the battles of our 
souls. 

It was all so unreal and yet so plain to our senses 
that perforce automatically our experience had to 
conclude it psychical. We were in air absolutely 
still. Yet above us the trees writhed and twisted and 
turned and bent and struck back, evidently in the 
power of a mighty force. Across the calm heavens 
the murk of flying atmosphere — I have always main- 
tained that if you looked closely enough you could 
see the wind — the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris 
fleeing high in the air; — these faintly hinted at intense 
movement rushing down through space. A roar of 
sound filled the hollow of the sky. Occasionally it 
intermitted, falling abruptly in volume like the mys- 
terious rare hushings of a rapid stream. Then the 

i9S 



THE MOUNTAINS 

familiar noises of a summer night became audible 
for the briefest instant, — a horse sneezed, an owl 
hooted, the wild call of birds came down the wind. 
And with a howl the legions of good and evil took 
up their warring. It was too real, and yet it was not 
reconcilable with the calm of our resting-places. 

For hours we lay thus in all the intensity of an 
inner storm and stress, which it seemed could not 
fail to develop us, to mould us, to age us, to leave 
on us its scars, to bequeath us its peace or remorse or 
despair, as would some great mysterious dark expe- 
rience direct from the sources of life. And then 
abruptly we were exhausted, as we should have been 
by too great emotion. We fell asleep. The morn- 
ing dawned still and clear, and garnished and set in 
order as though such things had never been. Only 
our white towel fluttered like a flag of truce in the 
direction the mighty elements had departed. 



196 



THE VALLEY 



XVI 
THE VALLEY 

ONCE upon a time I happened to be staying in 
a hotel room which had originally been part 
of a suite, but which was then cut off from the others 
by only a thin door through which sounds carried 
clearly. It was about eleven o'clock in the evening. 
The occupants of that next room came home. I 
heard the door open and close. Then the bed 
shrieked aloud as somebody fell heavily upon it. 
There breathed across the silence a deep restful sigh. 

" Mary," said a man's voice, " I 'm mighty sorry I 
did n't join that Association for Artificial Vacations. 
They guarantee to get you just as tired and just as 
mad in two days as you could by yourself in two 
weeks." 

We thought of that one morning as we descended 
the Glacier Point Trail in Yosemite. 

The contrast we need not have made so sharp. 
We might have taken the regular wagon-road by 
way of Chinquapin, but we preferred to stick to the 
trail, and so encountered our first sign of civiliza- 
tion within an hundred yards of the brink. It, the 
sign, was tourists. They were male and female, as 
the Lord had made them, but they had improved on 
that idea since. The women were freckled, hatted 

199 



THE MOUNTAINS 

with alpines, in which edelweiss — artificial, I think 
— flowered in abundance ; they sported severely 
plain flannel shirts, bloomers of an aggressive and un- 
necessary cut, and enormous square boots weighing 
pounds. The men had on hats just off the sunbonnet 
effect, pleated Norfolk jackets, bloomers ditto ditto to 
the women, stockings whose tops rolled over innum- 
erable times to help out the size of that which they 
should have contained, and also enormous square 
boots. The female children they put in skin-tight 
blue overalls. The male children they dressed in 
bloomers. Why this should be I cannot tell you. All 
carried toy hatchets with a spike on one end built to 
resemble the pictures of alpenstocks. 

They looked business-like, trod with an assured 
air of veterans and a seeming of experience more 
extended than it was possible to pack into any one 
human life. We stared at them, our eyes bulging 
out. They painfully and evidently concealed a curi- 
osity as to our pack-train. We wished them good-day, 
in order to see to what language heaven had fitted 
their extraordinary ideas as regards raiment. They 
inquired the way to something or other — I think 
Sentinel Dome. We had just arrived, so we did not 
know, but in order to show a friendly spirit we 
blandly pointed out a way. It may have led to Sen- 
tinel Dome for all I know. They departed uttering 
thanks in human speech. 

Now this particular bunch of tourists was evidently 
200 



THE VALLEY 

staying at the Glacier Point, and so was fresh. But 
in the course of that morning we descended straight 
down a drop of, is it four thousand feet ? The trail 
was steep and long and without water. During the 
descent we passed first and last probably twoscore 
of tourists, all on foot. A good half of them were 
delicate women, — young, middle-aged, a few gray- 
haired and evidently upwards of sixty. There were 
also old men, and fat men, and men otherwise out of 
condition. Probably nine out of ten, counting in the 
entire outfit, were utterly unaccustomed, when at 
home where grow street-cars and hansoms, to even 
the mildest sort of exercise. They had come into the 
Valley, whose floor is over four thousand feet up, 
without the slightest physical preparation for the al- 
titude. They had submitted to the fatigue of a long 
and dusty stage journey. And then they had merrily 
whooped it up at a gait which would have appalled 
seasoned old stagers like ourselves. Those blessed 
lunatics seemed positively unhappy unless they 
climbed up to some new point of view every day. 
I have never seen such a universally tired out, fraz- 
zled, vitally exhausted, white-faced, nervous com- 
munity in my life as I did during our four days' 
stay in the Valley. Then probably they go away, 
and take a month to get over it, and have queer re- 
sidual impressions of the trip. I should like to know 
what those impressions really are. 

Not but that Nature has done everything in her 



THE MOUNTAINS 

power to oblige them. The things I am about to say 
are heresy, but I hold them true. 

Yosemite is not as interesting nor as satisfying 
to me as some of the other big box canons, like 
those of the Tehipite, the Kings in its branches, or 
the Kawweah. I will admit that its waterfalls are 
better. Otherwise it possesses no features which are 
not to be seen in its sister valleys. And there is 
this difference. In Yosemite everything is jumbled 
together, apparently for the benefit of the tourist 
with a linen duster and but three days' time at his 
disposal. He can turn from the cliff-headland to the 
dome, from the dome to the half dome, to the gla- 
cier formation, the granite slide and all the rest of it, 
with hardly the necessity of stirring his feet. Nature 
has put samples of all her works here within reach 
of his cataloguing vision. Everything is crowded in 
together, like a row of houses in forty-foot lots. The 
mere things themselves are here in profusion and 
wonder, but the appropriate spacing, the approach, 
the surrounding of subordinate detail which should 
lead in artistic gradation to the supreme feature — 
these things, which are a real and essential part of 
esthetic effect, are lacking utterly for want of room. 
The place is not natural scenery; it is a junk-shop, a 
storehouse, a sample-room wherein the elements of 
natural scenery are to be viewed. It is not an arrange- 
ment of effects in accordance with the usual laws of 
landscape, but an abnormality, a freak of Nature. 



THE VALLEY 

All these things are to be found elsewhere. There 
are cliffs which to the naked eye are as grand as El 
Capitan ; domes, half domes, peaks as noble as any 
to be seen in the Valley ; sheer drops as breath-tak- 
ing as that from Glacier Point. But in other places 
each of these is led up to appropriately, and stands 
the central and satisfying feature to which all other 
things look. Then you journey on from your cliff, or 
whatever it happens to be, until, at just the right dis- 
tance, so that it gains from the presence of its neigh- 
bor without losing from its proximity, a dome or a 
pinnacle takes to itself the right of prominence. I 
concede the waterfalls ; but in other respects I prefer 
the sister valleys. 

That is not to say that one should not visit Yo- 
semite ; nor that one will be disappointed. It is grand 
beyond any possible human belief; and no one, even 
a nerve-frazzled tourist, can gaze on it without the 
strongest emotion. Only it is not so intimately satis- 
fying as it should be. It is a show. You do not take 
it into your heart. " Whew ! " you cry. " Is n't that 
a wonder ! " then after a moment, " Looks just like 
the photographs. Up to sample. Now let 's go." 

As we descended the trail, we and the tourists 
aroused in each other a mutual interest. One husband 
was trying to encourage his young and handsome wife 
to go on. She was beautifully dressed for the part 
in a marvelous, becoming costume of whipcord — 
short skirt, high laced elkskin boots and the rest of it ; 

203 



THE MOUNTAINS 

but in all her magnificence she had sat down on the 
ground, her back to the cliff, her legs across the trail, 
and was so tired out that she could hardly muster 
interest enough to pull them in out of the way of 
our horses' hoofs. The man inquired anxiously of 
us how far it was to the top. Now it was a long dis- 
tance to the top, but a longer to the bottom, so we 
lied a lie that I am sure was immediately forgiven 
us, and told them it was only a short climb. I should 
have offered them the use of Bullet, but Bullet had 
come far enough, and this was only one of a dozen 
such cases. In marked contrast was a jolly white- 
haired clergyman of the bishop type who climbed 
vigorously and hailed us with a shout. 

The horses were decidedly unaccustomed to any 
such sights, and we sometimes had our hands full 
getting them by on the narrow way. The trail was 
safe enough, but it did have an edge, and that edge 
jumped pretty straight off. It was interesting to ob- 
serve how the tourists acted. Some of them were 
perfect fools, and we had more trouble with them 
than we did with the horses. They could not seem 
to get the notion into their heads that all we wanted 
them to do was to get on the inside and stand still. 
About half of them were terrified to death, so that 
at the crucial moment, just as a horse was passing 
them, they had little fluttering panics that called the 
beast's attention. Most of the remainder tried to be 
bold and help. They reached out the hand of assist- 

204 



THE VALLEY 

ance toward the halter rope ; the astonished animal 
promptly snorted, tried to turn around, cannoned 
against the next in line. Then there was a mix-up. 
Two tall clean-cut well-bred looking girls of our slim 
patrician type offered us material assistance. They 
seemed to understand horses, and got out of the way 
in the proper manner, did just the right thing, and 
made sensible suggestions. I offer them my homage. 

They spoke to us as though they had penetrated 
the disguise of long travel, and could see we were 
not necessarily members of Burt Alvord's gang. 
This phase too of our descent became increasingly 
interesting to us, a species of gauge by which we 
measured the perceptions of those we encountered. 
Most did not speak to us at all. Others responded 
to our greetings with a reserve in which was more 
than a tinge of distrust. Still others patronized us. 
A very few overlooked our faded flannel shirts, our 
soiled trousers, our floppy old hats with their rattle- 
snake bands, the wear and tear of our equipment, to 
respond to us heartily. Them in return we generally 
perceived to belong to our totem. 

We found the floor of the Valley well sprinkled 
with campers. They had pitched all kinds of tents ; 
built all kinds of fancy permanent conveniences; 
erected all kinds of banners and signs advertising 
their identity, and were generally having a nice, easy, 
healthful, jolly kind of a time up there in the moun- 
tains. Their outfits they had either brought in with 

205 



THE MOUNTAINS 

their own wagons, or had had freighted. The store 
near the bend of the Merced supplied all their needs. 
It was truly a pleasant sight to see so many people 
enjoying themselves, for they were mostly those in 
moderate circumstances to whom a trip on tourist 
lines would be impossible. We saw bakers' and 
grocers' and butchers' wagons that had been pressed 
into service. A man, his wife, and little baby had 
come in an ordinary buggy, the one horse of which, 
led by the man, carried the woman and baby to the 
various points of interest. 

We reported to the official in charge, were allotted 
a camping and grazing place, and proceeded to make 
ourselves at home. 

During the next two days we rode comfortably 
here and there and looked at things. The things 
could not be spoiled, but their effect was very mate- 
rially marred by the swarms of tourists. Sometimes 
they were silly, and cracked inane and obvious jokes 
in ridicule of the grandest objects they had come so 
far to see ; sometimes they were detestable and left 
their insignificant calling-cards or their unimportant 
names where nobody could ever have any object in 
reading them ; sometimes they were pathetic and 
helpless and had to have assistance ; sometimes 
they were amusing ; hardly ever did they seem en- 
tirely human. I wonder what there is about the 
traveling public that seems so to set it apart, to make 
of it at least a sub-species of mankind? 

206 



THE VALLEY 

Among other things, we were vastly interested in 
the guides. They were typical of this sort of thing. 
Each morning one of these men took a pleasantly 
awe-stricken band of tourists out, led them around in 
the brush awhile, and brought them back in time for 
lunch. They wore broad hats and leather bands 
and exotic raiment and fierce expressions, and looked 
dark and mysterious and extra-competent over the 
most trivial of difficulties. 

Nothing could be more instructive than to see two 
or three of these imitation bad men starting out in 
the morning to " guide " a flock, say to Nevada Falls. 
The tourists, being about to mount, have outdone 
themselves in weird and awesome clothes — espe- 
cially the women. Nine out of ten wear their stirrups 
too short, so their knees are hunched up. One guide 
rides at the head — great deal of silver spur, clanking 
chain, and the rest of it. Another rides in the rear. 
The third rides up and down the line, very gruff, 
very preoccupied, very careworn over the dangers 
of the way. The cavalcade moves. It proceeds for 
about a mile. There arise sudden cries, great but 
subdued excitement. The leader stops, raising a 
commanding hand. Guide number three gallops up. 
There is a consultation. The cinch-strap of the brin- 
dle shave-tail is taken up two inches. A catastrophe 
has been averted. The noble three look volumes of 
relief. The cavalcade moves again. 

Now the trail rises. It is a nice, safe, easy trail. 
207 



THE MOUNTAINS 

But to the tourists it is made terrible. The noble 
three see to that. They pass more dangers by the 
exercise of superhuman skill than you or I could 
discover in a summer's close search. The joke of the 
matter is that those forty-odd saddle-animals have 
been over that trail so many times that one would 
have difficulty in heading them off from it once they 
got started. 

Very much the same criticism would hold as to 
the popular notion of the Yosemite stage-drivers. 
They drive well, and seem efficient men. But their 
wonderful reputation would have to be upheld on 
rougher roads than those into the Valley. The tourist 
is, of course, encouraged to believe that he is doing 
the hair-breadth escape ; but in reality, as mountain 
travel goes, the Yosemite stage-road is very mild. 

This that I have been saying is not by way of 
depreciation. But it seems to me that the Valley is 
wonderful enough to stand by itself in men's appre- 
ciation without the unreality of sickly sentimentalism 
in regard to imaginary dangers, or the histrionics of 
playing wilderness where no wilderness exists. 

As we went out, this time by the Chinquapin 
wagon-road, we met one stage-load after another of 
tourists coming in. They had not yet donned the 
outlandish attire they believe proper to the occasion, 
and so showed for what they were, — prosperous, 
well-bred, well-dressed travelers. In contrast to their 
smartness, the brilliancy of new-painted stages, the 

208 



THE VALLEY 

dash of the horses maintained by the Yosemite Stage 
Company, our own dusty travel-worn outfit of moun- 
tain ponies, our own rough clothes patched and 
faded, our sheath-knives and firearms seemed out of 
place and curious, as though a knight in medieval 
armor were to ride down Broadway. 

I do not know how many stages there were. We 
turned our pack-horses out for them all, dashing back 
and forth along the line, coercing the diabolical 
Dinkey. The road was too smooth. There were no 
obstructions to surmount; no dangers to avert; no 
difficulties to avoid. We could not get into trouble, 
but proceeded as on a county turnpike. Too tame, 
too civilized, too representative of the tourist ele- 
ment, it ended by getting on our nerves. The wil- 
derness seemed to have left us forever. Never would 
we get back to our own again. After a long time 
Wes, leading, turned into our old trail branching off 
to the high country. Hardly had we traveled a half 
mile before we heard from the advance guard a crash 
and a shout. 

" What is it, Wes *? " we yelled. 
In a moment the reply came, — 
" Lily 's fallen down again, — thank God ! " 
We understood what he meant. By this we knew 
that the tourist zone was crossed, that we had left 
the show country, and were once more in the open. 



209 



THE MAIN CREST 



XVII 
THE MAIN CREST 

THE traveler in the High Sierras generally keeps 
to the west of the main crest. Sometimes he 
approaches fairly to the foot of the last slope ; some- 
times he angles away and away even down to what 
finally seems to him a lower country, — to the pine 
mountains of only five or six thousand feet. But al- 
ways to the left or right of him, according to whether 
he travels south or north, runs the rampart of the sys- 
tem, sometimes glittering with snow, sometimes for- 
midable and rugged with splinters and spires of gran- 
ite. He crosses spurs and tributary ranges as high, 
as rugged, as snow-clad as these. They do not quite 
satisfy him. Over beyond he thinks he ought to see 
something great, — some wide outlook, some space 
bluer than his trail can offer him. One day or an- 
other he clamps his decision, and so turns aside for 
the simple and only purpose of standing on the top 
of the world. 

We were bitten by that idea while crossing the 
Granite Basin. The latter is some ten thousand feet 
in the air, a cup of rock five or six miles across, sur- 
rounded by mountains much higher than itself. That 
would have been sufficient for most moods, but, rest- 

213 



THE MOUNTAINS 

ing on the edge of a pass ten thousand six hundred 
feet high, we concluded that we surely would have 
to look over into Nevada. 

We got out the map. It became evident, after a 
little study, that by descending six thousand feet into 
a box canon, proceeding in it a few miles, and 
promptly climbing out again, by climbing steadily 
up the long narrow course of another box canon for 
about a day and a half 's journey, and then climbing 
out of that to a high ridge country with little flat 
valleys, we would come to a wide lake in a meadow 
eleven thousand feet up. There we could camp. 
The mountain opposite was thirteen thousand three 
hundred and twenty feet, so the climb from the 
lake became merely a matter of computation. This, 
we figured, would take us just a week, which may 
seem a considerable time to sacrifice to the gratifica- 
tion of a whim. But such a glorious whim ! 

We descended the great box canon, and scaled its 
upper end, following near the voices of a cascade. 
Cliffs thousands of feet high hemmed us in. At the 
very top of them strange crags leaned out looking 
down on us in the abyss. From a projection a colos- 
sal sphinx gazed solemnly across at a dome as smooth 
and symmetrical as, but vastly larger than, St. Peter's 
at Rome. 

The trail labored up to the brink of the cascade. 
At once we entered a long narrow aisle between reg- 
ular palisaded cliffs. 

214 



THE MAIN CREST 

The formation was exceedingly regular. At the 
top the precipice fell sheer for a thousand feet or so ; 
then the steep slant of the debris, like buttresses, 
down almost to the bed of the river. The lower parts 
of the buttresses were clothed with heavy chaparral, 
which, nearer moisture, developed into cottonwoods, 
alders, tangled vines, flowers, rank grasses. And away 
on the very edge of the cliffs, close under the sky, 
were pines, belittled by distance, solemn and aloof, 
like Indian warriors wrapped in their blankets watch- 
ing from an eminence the passage of a hostile force. 

We caught rainbow trout in the dashing white 
torrent of the river. We followed the trail through 
delicious thickets redolent with perfume ; over the 
roughest granite slides, along still dark aisles of forest 
groves, between the clefts of boulders so monstrous 
as almost to seem an insult to the credulity. Among 
the chaparral, on the slope of the buttress across the 
river, we made out a bear feeding. Wes and I sat 
ten minutes waiting for him to show sufficiently 
for a chance. Then we took a shot at about four 
hundred yards, and hit him somewhere so he angled 
down the hill furiously. We left the Tenderfoot to 
watch that he did not come out of the big thicket of 
the river bottom where last we had seen him, while 
we scrambled upstream nearly a mile looking for a 
way across. Then we trailed him by the blood, each 
step one of suspense, until we fairly had to crawl in 
after him ; and shot him five times more, three in the 

215 



THE MOUNTAINS 

head, before he gave up not six feet from us; and 
shouted gloriously and skinned that bear. But the 
meat was badly bloodshot, for there were three bullets 
in the head, two in the chest and shoulders, one 
through the paunch, and one in the hind quarters. 

Since we were much in want of meat, this grieved 
us. But that noon while we ate, the horses ran down 
toward us, and wheeled, as though in cavalry forma- 
tion, looking toward the hill and snorting. So I put 
down my tin plate gently, and took up my rifle, and 
without rising shot that bear through the back of the 
neck. We took his skin, and also his hind quarters, 
and went on. 

By the third day from Granite Basin we reached 
the end of the long narrow canon with the high cliffs 
and the dark pine-trees and the very blue sky. 
Therefore we turned sharp to the left and climbed 
laboriously until we had come up into the land of 
big boulders, strange spare twisted little trees, and 
the singing of the great wind. 

The country here was mainly of granite. It out- 
cropped in dikes, it slid down the slopes in aprons, 
it strewed the prospect in boulders and blocks, it 
seamed the hollows with knife-ridges. Soil gave the 
impression of having been laid on top ; you divined 
the granite beneath it, and not so very far beneath it, 
either. A fine hair-grass grew close to this soil, as 
though to produce as many blades as possible in the 
limited area. 

216 



THE MAIN CREST 

But strangest of all were the little thick twisted 
trees with the rich shaded umber color of their trunks. 
They occurred rarely, but still in sufficient regu- 
larity to lend the impression of a scattered grove- 
cohesiveness. Their limbs were sturdy and reaching 
fantastically. On each trunk the colors ran in streaks, 
patches, and gradations from a sulphur yellow, 
through browns and red-orange, to a rich red-umber. 
They were like the earth-dwarfs of German legend, 
come out to view the roof of their workshop in the 
interior of the hill ; or, more subtly, like some of the 
more fantastic engravings of Gustave Dore. 

We camped that night at a lake whose banks 
were pebbled in the manner of an artificial pond, and 
whose setting was a thin meadow of the fine hair- 
grass, for the grazing of which the horses had to bare 
their teeth. All about, the granite mountains rose. 
The timber-line, even of the rare shrub-like gnome- 
trees, ceased here. Above us was nothing whatever 
but granite rock, snow, and the sky. 

It was just before dusk, and in the lake the fish 
were jumping eagerly. They took the fly well, and 
before the fire was alight we had caught three for 
supper. When I say we caught but three, you will 
understand that they were of good size. Firewood 
was scarce, but we dragged in enough by means of 
Old Slob and a riata to build us a good fire. And 
we needed it, for the cold descended on us with the 
sharpness and vigor of eleven thousand feet. 

217 



THE MOUNTAINS 

For such an altitude the spot was ideal. The lake 
just below us was full of fish. A little stream ran 
from it by our very elbows. The slight elevation was 
level, and covered with enough soil to offer a fairly 
good substructure for our beds. The flat in which 
was the lake reached on up narrower and narrower to 
the foot of the last slope, furnishing for the horses an 
admirable natural corral about a mile long. And the 
view was magnificent. 

First of all there were the mountains above us, 
towering grandly serene against the sky of morning ; 
then all about us the tumultuous slabs and boulders 
and blocks of granite among which dare-devil and 
hardy little trees clung to a footing as though in de- 
fiance of some great force exerted against them ; then 
below us a sheer drop, into which our brook plunged, 
with its suggestion of depths; and finally beyond 
those depths the giant peaks of the highest Sierras 
rising lofty as the sky, shrouded in a calm and stately 
peace. 

Next day the Tenderfoot and I climbed to the 
top. Wes decided at the last minute that he had n't 
lost any mountains, and would prefer to fish. 

The ascent was accompanied by much breathless- 
ness and a heavy pounding of our hearts, so that we 
were forced to stop every twenty feet to recover our 
physical balance. Each step upward dragged at our 
feet like a leaden weight. Yet once we were on the 
level, or once we ceased our very real exertions for a 

218 



THE MAIN CREST 

second or so, the difficulty left us, and we breathed 
as easily as in the lower altitudes. 

The air itself was of a quality impossible to de- 
scribe to you unless you have traveled in the high 
countries. I know it is trite to say that it had the 
exhilaration of wine, yet. I can find no better simile. 
We shouted and whooped and breathed deep and 
wanted to do things. 

The immediate surroundings of that mountain 
peak were absolutely barren and absolutely still. 
How it was accomplished so high up I do not know, 
but the entire structure on which we moved — I can- 
not say walked — was composed of huge granite 
slabs. Sometimes these were laid side by side like 
exaggerated paving flags ; but oftener they were up- 
ended, piled in a confusion over which we had pre- 
cariously to scramble. And the silence. It was so 
still that the very ringing in our ears came to a pro- 
minence absurd and almost terrifying. The wind 
swept by noiseless, because it had nothing movable to 
startle into noise. The solid eternal granite lay heavy 
in its statics across the possibility of even a whisper. 
The blue vault of heaven seemed emptied of sound. 

But the wind did stream by unceasingly, weird 
in the unaccustomedness of its silence. And the sky 
was blue as a turquoise, and the sun burned fiercely, 
and the air was cold as the water of a mountain 
spring. 

We stretched ourselves behind a slab of granite, 
219 



THE MOUNTAINS 

and ate the luncheon we had brought, cold venison 
steak and bread. By and by a marvelous thing hap- 
pened. A flash of wings sparkled in the air, a brave 
little voice challenged us cheerily, a pert tiny rock- 
wren flirted his tail and darted his wings and wanted 
to know what we were thinking of anyway to enter 
his especial territory. And shortly from nowhere 
appeared two Canada Jays, silent as the wind itself, 
hoping for a share in our meal. Then the Tenderfoot 
discovered in a niche some strange, hardy alpine flow- 
ers. So we established a connection, through these 
wondrous brave children of the great mother, with 
the world of living things. 

After we had eaten, which was the very first thing 
we did, we walked to the edge of the main crest and 
looked over. That edge went straight down. I do 
not know how far, except that even in contemplation 
we entirely lost our breaths, before we had fallen half 
way to the bottom. Then intervened a ledge, and in 
the ledge was a round glacier lake of the very deep- 
est and richest ultramarine you can find among your 
paint-tubes, and on the lake floated cakes of daz- 
zling white ice. That was enough for the moment. 

Next we leaped at one bound direct down to some 
brown hazy liquid shot with the tenderest filaments 
of white. After analysis we discovered the hazy 
brown liquid to be the earth of the plains, and the 
filaments of white to be roads. Thus instructed we 
made out specks which were towns. That was all. 




We walked to the edge of the main crest and looked over 



THE MAIN CREST 

The rest was too insignificant to classify without the 
aid of a microscope. 

And afterwards, across those plains, oh, many, 
many leagues, were the Inyo and Panamit moun- 
tains, and beyond them Nevada and Arizona, and 
blue mountains, and bluer, and still bluer rising, ris- 
ing, rising higher and higher until at the level of the 
eye they blended with the heavens and were lost 
somewhere away out beyond the edge of the world. 

We said nothing, but looked for a long time. 
Then we turned inland to the wonderful great titans 
of mountains clear-cut in the crystalline air. Never 
was such air. Crystalline is the only word which will 
describe it, for almost it seemed that it would ring 
clearly when struck, so sparkling and delicate and 
fragile was it. The crags and fissures across the 
way — two miles across the way — were revealed 
through it as through some medium whose transpar- 
ence was absolute. They challenged the eye, stereo- 
scopic in their relief. Were it not for the belittling 
effects of the distance, we felt that we might count 
the frost seams or the glacial scorings on every gran- 
ite apron. Far below we saw the irregular outline 
of our lake. It looked like a pond a few hundred 
feet down. Then we made out a pin-point of white 
moving leisurely near its border. After a while we 
realized that the pin-point of white was one of 
our pack-horses, and immediately the flat little scene 
shot backwards as though moved from behind and 



THE MOUNTAINS 

acknowledged its due number of miles. The minia- 
ture crags at its back became gigantic ; the peaks 
beyond grew thousands of feet in the establishment 
of a proportion which the lack of " atmosphere " had 
denied. We never succeeded in getting adequate 
photographs. As well take pictures of any eroded 
little arroyo or granite canon. Relative sizes do not 
exist, unless pointed out. 

" See that speck there *? " we explain. " That 's a 
big pine-tree. So by that you can see how tremen- 
dous those cliffs really are." 

And our guest looks incredulously at the speck. 

There was snow, of course, lying cold in the hot 
sun. This phenomenon always impresses a man when 
first he sees it. Often I have ridden with my sleeves 
rolled up and the front of my shirt open, over drifts 
whose edges, even, dripped no water. The direct 
rays seem to have absolutely no effect. A scientific 
explanation I have never heard expressed ; but I 
suppose the cold nights freeze the drifts and pack 
them so hard that the short noon heat cannot pene- 
trate their density. I may be quite wrong as to my 
reason, but I am entirely correct as to my fact. 

Another curious thing is that we met our mosqui- 
toes only rarely below the snow-line. The camping 
in the Sierras is ideal for lack of these pests. They 
never bite hard nor stay long even when found. But 
just as sure as we approached snow, then we renewed 
acquaintance with our old friends of the north woods. 




At every stride we stepped ten feet and slid five 



THE MAIN CREST 

It is analogous to the fact that the farther north you 
go into the fur countries, the more abundant they 
become. 

By and by it was time to descend. The camp lay 
directly below us. We decided to go to it straight, 
and so stepped off on an impossibly steep slope cov- 
ered, not with the great boulders and granite blocks, 
but with a fine loose shale. At every stride we 
stepped ten feet and slid five. It was gloriously near 
to flying. Leaning far back, our arms spread wide to 
keep our balance, spying alertly far ahead as to where 
we were going to land, utterly unable to check until 
we encountered a half-buried ledge of some sort, and 
shouting wildly at every plunge, we fairly shot down- 
hill. The floor of our valley rose to us as the earth 
to a descending balloon. In three quarters of an hour 
we had reached the first flat. 

There we halted to puzzle over the trail of a moun- 
tain lion clearly printed on the soft ground. What 
had the great cat been doing away up there above 
the hunting country, above cover, above everything 
that would appeal to a well-regulated cat of any size 
whatsoever"? We theorized at length, but gave it 
up finally, and went on. Then a familiar perfume 
rose to our nostrils. We plucked curiously at a bed 
of catnip and wondered whether the animal had jour- 
neyed so far to enjoy what is always such a treat to 
her domestic sisters. 

It was nearly dark when we reached camp. We 
223 



THE MOUNTAINS 

found Wes contentedly scraping away at the bear- 
skins. 

" Hello," said he, looking up with a grin. " Hello, 
you darn fools ! I've been having a good time. I've 
been fishing." 



224 



THE GIANT FOREST 



XVIII 
THE GIANT FOREST 

EVERY one is familiar, at least by reputation and 
photograph, with the Big Trees of California. 
All have seen pictures of stage-coaches driving in 
passageways cut through the bodies of the trunks ; 
of troops of cavalry ridden on the prostrate trees. No 
one but has heard of the dancing-floor or the dinner- 
table cut from a single cross-section; and probably 
few but have seen some of the fibrous bark of unbe- 
lievable thickness. The Mariposa, Calaveras, and 
Santa Cruz groves have become household names. 

The public at large, I imagine, meaning by that 
you and me and our neighbors, harbor an idea that 
the Big Tree occurs only as a remnant, in scattered 
little groves carefully fenced and piously visited by 
the tourist. What would we have said to the infor- 
mation that in the very heart of the Sierras there grows 
a thriving forest of these great trees ; that it takes 
over a day to ride throughout that forest ; and that 
it comprises probably over five thousand specimens ? 

Yet such is the case. On the ridges and high pla- 
teaus north of the Kaweah River is the forest I de- 
scribe ; and of that forest the trees grow from fifteen 
to twenty-six feet in diameter. Do you know what 

227 



THE MOUNTAINS 

that means ? Get up from your chair and pace off 
the room you are in. If it is a very big room, its 
longest dimension would just about contain one of the 
bigger trunks. Try to imagine a tree like that. 

It must be a columnar tree straight and true as the 
supports of a Greek facade. The least deviation from 
the perpendicular of such a mass would cause it to 
fall. The limbs are sturdy like the arms of Hercules, 
and grow out from the main trunk direct instead of 
dividing and leading that main trunk to themselves, 
as is the case with other trees. The column rises with 
a true taper to its full height ; then is finished with 
the conical effect of the top of a monument. 
Strangely enough the frond is exceedingly fine, and 
the cones small. 

When first you catch sight of a Sequoia, it does 
not impress you particularly except as a very fine 
tree. Its proportions are so perfect that its effect is 
rather to belittle its neighbors than to show in its true 
magnitude. Then, gradually, as your experience 
takes cognizance of surroundings, — the size of a 
sugar-pine, of a boulder, of a stream flowing near, — 
the giant swells and swells before your very vision 
until he seems at the last even greater than the mere 
statistics of his inches had led you to believe. And 
after that first surprise over finding the Sequoia some- 
thing not monstrous but beautiful in proportion has 
given place to the full realization of what you are 
beholding, you will always wonder why no one who 

228 




The Sequoia . . . not monstrous, but beautiful 



THE GIANT FOREST 

has seen has ever given any one who has not seen an 
adequate idea of these magnificent old trees. 

Perhaps the most insistent note, besides that of 
mere size and dignity, is of absolute stillness. These 
trees do not sway to the wind, their trunks are con- 
structed to stand solid. Their branches do not bend 
and murmur, for they too are rigid in fiber. Their 
fine thread-like needles may catch the breeze's whis- 
per, may draw together and apart for the exchange 
of confidences as do the leaves of other trees, but if 
so, you and I are too far below to distinguish it. 
All about, the other forest growths may be rustling 
and bowing and singing with the voices of the air ; 
the Sequoia stands in the hush of an absolute calm. 
It is as though he dreamed, too wrapt in still great 
thoughts of his youth, when the earth itself was 
young, to share the worldlier joys of his neighbor, to 
be aware of them, even himself to breathe deeply. 
You feel in the presence of these trees as you would 
feel in the presence of a kindly and benignant sage, 
too occupied with larger things to enter fully into 
your little affairs, but well disposed in the wisdom 
of clear spiritual insight. 

This combination of dignity, immobility, and a 
certain serene detachment has on me very much the 
same effect as does a mountain against the sky. It is 
quite unlike the impression made by any other tree, 
however large, and is lovable. 

We entered the Giant Forest by a trail that 
229 



THE MOUNTAINS 

climbed. Always we entered desirable places by 
trails that climbed or dropped. Our access to para- 
dise was never easy. About halfway up we met five 
pack-mules and two men coming down. For some 
reason, unknown, I suspect, even to the god of 
chance, our animals behaved themselves and walked 
straight ahead in a beautiful dignity, while those 
weak-minded mules scattered and bucked and scraped 
under trees and dragged back on their halters when 
caught. The two men cast on us malevolent glances 
as often as they were able, but spent most of their 
time swearing and running about. We helped them 
once or twice by heading off, but were too thank- 
fully engaged in treading lightly over our own phe- 
nomenal peace to pay much attention. Long after 
we had gone on, we caught bursts of rumpus ascend- 
ing from below. Shortly we came to a comparatively 
level country, and a little meadow, and a rough sign 
which read 

" Feed 200 a night." 

Just beyond this extortion was the Giant Forest. 

We entered it toward the close of the afternoon, 
and rode on after our wonted time looking for feed 
at less than twenty cents a night. The great trunks, 
fluted like marble columns, blackened against the 
western sky. As they grew huger, we seemed to 
shrink, until we moved fearful as prehistoric man 
must have moved among the forces over which he 

230 



THE GIANT FOREST 

had no control. We discovered our feed in a narrow 
" stringer " a few miles on. That night, we, pigmies, 
slept in the setting before which should have stridden 
the colossi of another age. Perhaps eventually, in 
spite of its magnificence and wonder, we were a little 
glad to leave the Giant Forest. It held us too rigidly 
to a spiritual standard of which our normal lives were 
incapable ; it insisted on a loftiness of soul, a dignity, 
an aloofness from the ordinary affairs of life, the ordi- 
nary occupations of thought hardly compatible with 
the powers of any creature less noble, less aged, less 
wise in the passing of centuries than itself. 



231 



ON COWBOYS 



XIX 

ON COWBOYS 

YOUR cowboy is a species variously subdivided. 
If you happen to be traveled as to the wild 
countries, you will be able to recognize whence 
your chance acquaintance hails by the kind of saddle 
he rides, and the rigging of it ; by the kind of rope 
he throws, and the method of the throwing; by the 
shape of hat he wears; by his twist of speech ; even 
by the very manner of his riding. Your California 
" vaquero " from the Coast Ranges is as unlike as 
possible to your Texas cowman, and both differ from 
the Wyoming or South Dakota article. I should be 
puzzled to define exactly the habitat of the " typical " 
cowboy. No matter where you go, you will find 
your individual acquaintance varying from the type 
in respect to some of the minor details. 

Certain characteristics run through the whole tribe, 
however. Of these some are so well known or have 
been so adequately done elsewhere that it hardly 
seems wise to elaborate on them here. Let us assume 
that you and I know what sort of human beings cow- 
boys are, — with all their taciturnity, their surface 
gravity, their keen sense of humor, their courage, 
their kindness, their freedom, their lawlessness, their 

235 



THE MOUNTAINS 

foulness of mouth, and their supreme skill in the 
handling of horses and cattle. I shall try to tell you 
nothing of all that. 

If one thinks down doggedly to the last analysis, 
he will find that the basic reason for the differences 
between a cowboy and other men rests finally on 
an individual liberty, a freedom from restraint either 
of society or convention, a lawlessness, an accepting 
of his own standard alone. He is absolutely self- 
poised and sufficient; and that self-poise and that 
sufficiency he takes pains to assure first of all. After 
their assurance he is willing to enter into human re- 
lations. His attitude toward everything in life is, not 
suspicious, but watchful. He is " gathered together," 
his elbows at his side. 

This evidences itself most strikingly in his terse- 
ness of speech. A man dependent on himself natu- 
rally does not give himself away to the first comer. 
He is more interested in finding out what the other 
fellow is than in exploiting his own importance. A 
man who does much promiscuous talking he is likely 
to despise, arguing that man incautious, hence weak. 

Yet when he does talk, he talks to the point and 
with a vivid and direct picturesqueness of phrase 
which is as refreshing as it is unexpected. The de- 
lightful remodeling of the English language in Mr. 
Alfred Lewis's " Wolfville " is exaggerated only in 
quantity, not in quality. No cowboy talks habitually 
in quite as original a manner as Mr. Lewis's Old 

236 



ON COWBOYS 

Cattleman ; but I have no doubt that in time he 
would be heard to say all the good things in that 
volume. I myself have note-books full of just such 
gorgeous language, some of the best of which I have 
used elsewhere, and so will not repeat here. 1 

This vividness manifests itself quite as often in the 
selection of the apt word as in the construction of 
elaborate phrases with a half-humorous intention. A 
cowboy once told me of the arrival of a tramp by 
saying, " He sifted into camp." Could any verb be 
more expressive *? Does not it convey exactly the 
lazy, careless, out-at-heels shuffling gait of the hobo ? 
Another in the course of description told of a saloon 
scene, " They all bellied up to the bar." Again, a 
range cook, objecting to purposeless idling about his 
fire, shouted : " If you fellows come moping around 
here any more, / 7/ sure make you hard to catch ! " 
" Fish in that pond, son ? Why, there 's some fish 
in there big enough to rope," another advised me. 
" I quit shoveling," one explained the story of his 
life, " because I could n't see nothing ahead of shov- 
eling but dirt." The same man described ploughing 
as, " Looking at a mule's tail all day." And one of 
the most succinct epitomes of the motifs of fiction 
was offered by an old fellow who looked over my 
shoulder as I was reading a novel. " Well, son," said 
he, " what they doing now, kissing or killing ? " 

1 See especially Jackson Himes in The Blazed Trail ; and The 
Rawhide. 

2 37 



THE MOUNTAINS 

Nor are the complete phrases behind in aptness. I 
have space for only a few examples, but they will 
illustrate what I mean. Speaking of a companion 
who was " putting on too much dog," I was informed, 
" He walks like a man with a new suit of wooden under- 
wear ! " Or again, in answer to my inquiry as to a 
mutual acquaintance, " Jim % Oh, poor old Jim ! For 
the last week or so he's been nothing but an insig- 
nificant atom of humanity hitched to a boil." 

But to observe the riot of imagination turned loose 
with the bridle off, you must assist at a burst of anger 
on the part of one of these men. It is mostly un- 
printable, but you will get an entirely new idea of 
what profanity means. Also you will come to the 
conclusion that you, with your trifling damns, and 
the like, have been a very good boy indeed. The 
remotest, most obscure, and unheard of conceptions 
are dragged forth from earth, heaven, and hell, and 
linked together in a sequence so original, so gaudy, 
and so utterly blasphemous, that you gasp and are 
stricken with the most devoted admiration. It is genius. 

Of course I can give you no idea here of what 
these truly magnificent oaths are like. It is a pity, 
for it would liberalize your education. Occasionally, 
like a trickle of clear water into an alkali torrent, a 
straight English sentence will drop into the flood. It 
is refreshing by contrast, but weak. 

" If your brains were all made of dynamite, you 
could n't blow the top of your head off." 

238 



ON COWBOYS 

" I would n't speak to him if I met him in hell 
carrying a lump of ice in his hand." 

" That little horse '11 throw you so high the black- 
birds will build nests in your hair before you come 
down." 

These are ingenious and amusing, but need the 
blazing settings from which I have ravished them to 
give them their due force. 

In Arizona a number of us were sitting around 
the feeble camp-fire the desert scarcity of fuel per- 
mits, smoking our pipes. We were all contemplative 
and comfortably silent with the exception of one 
very youthful person who had a lot to say. It was 
mainly about himself. After he had bragged awhile 
without molestation, one of the older cow-punchers 
grew very tired of it. He removed his pipe deliber- 
ately, and spat in the fire. 

" Say, son," he drawled, " if you want to say some- 
thing big, why don't you say ' elephant ' ? " 

The young fellow subsided. We went on smok- 
ing our pipes. 

Down near the Chiracahua Range in southeastern 
Arizona, there is a butte, and halfway up that butte 
is a cave, and in front of that cave is a ramshackle 
porch-roof or shed. This latter makes the cave into 
a dwelling-house. It is inhabited by an old " alkali " 
and half a dozen bear dogs. I sat with the old fellow 
one day for nearly an hour. It was a sociable visit, 
but economical of the English language. He made 

239 



THE MOUNTAINS 

one remark, outside our initial greeting. It was 
enough, for in terseness, accuracy, and compression, 
I have never heard a better or more comprehensive 
description of the arid countries. 

" Son," said he, " in this country thar is more cows 
and less butter, more rivers and less water, and you 
kin see farther and see less than in any other country 
in the world." 

Now this peculiar directness of phrase means but 
one thing, — freedom from the influence of conven- 
tion. The cowboy respects neither the dictionary nor 
usage. He employs his words in the manner that 
best suits him, and arranges them in the sequence 
that best expresses his idea, untrammeled by tradi- 
tion. It is a phase of the same lawlessness, the same 
reliance on self, that makes for his taciturnity and 
watchfulness. 

In essence, his dress is an adaptation to the neces- 
sities of his calling; as a matter of fact, it is an 
elaboration on that. The broad heavy felt hat he 
has found by experience to be more effective in turn- 
ing heat than a lighter straw; he further runs to 
variety in the shape of the crown and in the nature 
of the band. He wears a silk handkerchief about his 
neck to turn the sun and keep out the dust, but in- 
dulges in astonishing gaudiness of color. His gaunt- 
lets save his hands from the rope ; he adds a fringe 
and a silver star. The heavy wide " chaps " of leather 
about his legs are necessary to him when he is riding 

240 



ON COWBOYS 

fast through brush; he indulges in such frivolities 
as stamped leather, angora hair, and the like. High 
heels to his boots prevent his foot from slipping 
through his wide stirrup, and are useful to dig into 
the ground when he is roping in the corral. Even 
his six-shooter is more a tool of his trade than a 
weapon of defense. With it he frightens cattle from 
the heavy brush ; he slaughters old or diseased steers ; 
he " turns the herd " in a stampede or when round- 
ing it in ; and especially is it handy and loose to his 
hip in case his horse should fall and commence to 
drag him. 

So the details of his appearance spring from the 
practical, but in the wearing of them and the using 
of them he shows again that fine disregard for the 
way other people do it or think it. 

Now in civilization you and I entertain a double 
respect for firearms and the law. Firearms are dan- 
gerous, and it is against the law to use them promis- 
cuously. If we shoot them off in unexpected places, 
we first of all alarm unduly our families and neigh- 
bors, and in due course attract the notice of the po- 
lice. By the time we are grown up we look on shoot- 
ing a revolver as something to be accomplished after 
an especial trip for the purpose. 

But to the cowboy shooting a gun is merely what 
lighting a match would be to us. We take reason- 
able care not to scratch that match on the wall nor to 
throw it where it will do harm. Likewise the cow- 

241 



THE MOUNTAINS 

boy takes reasonable care that his bullets do not land 
in some one's anatomy nor in too expensive bric-a- 
brac. Otherwise any time or place will do. 

The picture comes to me of a bunk-house on an 
Arizona range. The time was evening. A half-dozen 
cowboys were sprawled out on the beds smoking, 
and three more were playing poker with the Chinese 
cook. A misguided rat darted out from under one 
of the beds and made for the empty fireplace. He 
finished his journey in smoke. Then the four who 
had shot slipped their guns back into their holsters 
and resumed their cigarettes and drawling low-toned 
conversation. 

On another occasion I stopped for noon at the 
Circle I ranch. While waiting for dinner, I lay on 
my back in the bunk-room and counted three hun- 
dred and sixty-two bullet-holes in the ceiling. They 
came to be there because the festive cowboys used to 
while away the time while lying as I was lying, wait- 
ing for supper, in shooting the flies that crawled about 
the plaster. 

This beautiful familiarity with the pistol as a par- 
lor toy accounts in great part for a cowboy's propen- 
sity to " shoot up the town " and his indignation 
when arrested therefor. 

The average cowboy is only a fair target-shot with 
the revolver. But he is chain lightning at getting 
his gun off in a hurry. There are exceptions to this, 
however, especially among the older men. Some 

242 



ON COWBOYS 

can handle the Colts 45 and its heavy recoil with 
almost uncanny accuracy. I have seen individuals 
who could from their saddles nip lizards darting 
across the road ; and one who was able to perfor- 
ate twice before it hit the ground a tomato-can 
tossed into the air. The cowboy is prejudiced against 
the double-action gun, for some reason or other. He 
manipulates his single-action weapon fast enough, 
however. 

His sense of humor takes the same unexpected 
slants, not because his mental processes differ from 
those of other men, but because he is unshackled by 
the subtle and unnoticed nothingnesses of precedent 
which deflect our action toward the common uni- 
formity of our neighbors. It must be confessed that 
his sense of humor possesses also a certain robust- 
ness. 

The J. H. outfit had been engaged for ten days in 
busting broncos. This the Chinese cook, Sang, a 
newcomer in the territory, found vastly amusing. 
He liked to throw the ropes off the prostrate broncos, 
when all was ready ; to slap them on the flanks ; to 
yell shrill Chinese yells ; and to dance in celestial 
delight when the terrified animal arose and scattered 
out of there. But one day the range men drove up 
a little bunch of full-grown cattle that had been 
bought from a smaller owner. It was necessary to 
change the brands. Therefore a little fire was built, 
the stamp-brand put in to heat, and two of the men 

243 



THE MOUNTAINS 

on horseback caught a cow by the horns and one 
hind leg, and promptly upset her. The old brand 
was obliterated, the new one burnt in. This irritated 
the cow. Promptly the branding-men, who were of 
course afoot, climbed to the top of the corral to be 
out of the way. At this moment, before the horse- 
men could flip loose their ropes, Sang appeared. 

" Hoi' on ! " he babbled. " I take him off; " and 
he scrambled over the fence and approached the 
cow. 

Now cattle of any sort rush at the first object they 
see after getting to their feet. But whereas a steer 
makes a blind run and so can be avoided, a cow 
keeps her eyes open. Sang approached that wild- 
eyed cow, a bland smile on his countenance. 

A dead silence fell. Looking about at my com- 
panions' faces I could not discern even in the depths 
of their eyes a single faint flicker of human interest. 

Sang loosened the rope from the hind leg, he 
threw it from the horns, he slapped the cow with his 
hat, and uttered the shrill Chinese yell. So far all was 
according to programme. 

The cow staggered to her feet, her eyes blazing 
fire. She took one good look, and then started for 
Sang. 

What followed occurred with all the briskness of 
a tune from a circus band. Sang darted for the cor- 
ral fence. Now, three sides of the corral were railed, 
and so climbable, but the fourth was a solid adobe 

244 



ON COWBOYS 

wall. Of course Sang went for the wall. There, 
finding his nails would not stick, he fled down the 
length of it, his queue streaming, his eyes popping, 
his talons curved toward an ideal of safety, gibbering 
strange monkey talk, pursued a scant arm's length 
behind by that infuriated cow. Did any one help 
him *? Not any. Every man of that crew was hang- 
ing weak from laughter to the horn of his saddle or 
the top of the fence. The preternatural solemnity 
had broken to little bits. Men came running from 
the bunk-house, only to go into spasms outside, to 
roll over and over on the ground, clutching handfuls 
of herbage in the agony of their delight. 

At the end of the corral was a narrow chute. Into 
this Sang escaped as into a burrow. The cow came 
too. Sang, in desperation, seized a pole, but the cow 
dashed such a feeble weapon aside. Sang caught 
sight of a little opening, too small for cows, back 
into the main corral. He squeezed through. The 
cow crashed through after him, smashing the boards. 
At the crucial moment Sang tripped and fell on his 
face. The cow missed him by so close a margin that 
for a moment we thought she had hit. But she had 
not, and before she could turn, Sang had topped the 
fence and was halfway to the kitchen. Tom Waters 
always maintained that he spread his Chinese sleeves 
and flew. Shortly after a tremendous smoke arose 
from the kitchen chimney. Sang had gone back to 
cooking. 

245 



THE MOUNTAINS 

Now that Mongolian was really in great danger, 
but no one of the outfit thought for a moment of 
any but the humorous aspect of the affair. Analo- 
gously, in a certain small cow-town I happened to be 
transient when the postmaster shot a Mexican. No- 
thing was done about it. The man went right on 
being postmaster, but he had to set up the drinks 
because he had hit the Mexican in the stomach. 
That was considered a poor place to hit a man. 

The entire town of Willcox knocked off work 
for nearly a day to while away the tedium of an en- 
forced wait there on my part. They wanted me to 
go fishing. One man offered a team, the other a sad- 
dle-horse. All expended much eloquence in direct- 
ing me accurately, so that I should be sure to find 
exactly the spot where I could hang my feet over a 
bank beneath which there were " a plumb plenty of 
fish." Somehow or other they raked out miscellane- 
ous tackle. But they were a little too eager. I ex- 
cused myself and hunted up a map. Sure enough 
the lake was there, but it had been dry since a pre- 
vious geological period. The fish were undoubtedly 
there too, but they were fossil fish. I borrowed a 
pickaxe and shovel and announced myself as ready 
to start. 

Outside the principal saloon in one town hung a 
gong. When a stranger was observed to enter the sa- 
loon, that gong was sounded. Then it behooved him 
to treat those who came in answer to the summons. 

246 



ON COWBOYS 

But when it comes to a case of real hospitality 
or helpfulness, your cowboy is there every time. 
You are welcome to food and shelter without price, 
whether he is at home or not. Only it is etiquette to 
leave your name and thanks pinned somewhere about 
the place. Otherwise your intrusion may be con- 
sidered in the light of a theft, and you may be pur- 
sued accordingly. 

Contrary to general opinion, the cowboy is not 
a dangerous man to those not looking for trouble. 
There are occasional exceptions, of course, but they 
belong to the universal genus of bully, and can be 
found among any class. Attend to your own busi- 
ness, be cool and good-natured, and your skin is 
safe. Then when it is really " up to you," be a man ; 
you will never lack for friends. 

The Sierras, especially towards the south where 
the meadows are wide and numerous, are full of cat- 
tle in small bands. They come up from the desert 
about the first of June, and are driven back again 
to the arid countries as soon as the autumn storms 
begin. In the very high land they are few, and to 
be left to their own devices; but now we entered a 
new sort of country. 

Below Farewell Gap and the volcanic regions 
one's surroundings change entirely. The meadows 
become high flat valleys, often miles in extent ; the 
mountains — while registering big on the aneroid — 
are so little elevated above the plateaus that a few 

247 



THE MOUNTAINS 

thousand feet is all of their apparent height; the 
passes are low, the slopes easy, the trails good, the 
rock outcrops few, the hills grown with forests to 
their very tops. Altogether it is a country easy to 
ride through, rich in grazing, cool and green, with its 
eight thousand feet of elevation. Consequently during 
the hot months thousands of desert cattle are pastured 
here ; and with them come many of the desert men. 
Our first intimation of these things was in the vol- 
canic region where swim the golden trout. From the 
advantage of a hill we looked far down to a hair-grass 
meadow through which twisted tortuously a brook, 
and by the side of the brook, belittled by distance, 
was a miniature man. We could see distinctly his 
every movement, as he approached cautiously the 
stream's edge, dropped his short line at the end of a 
stick over the bank, and then yanked bodily the fish 
from beneath. Behind him stood his pony. We 
could make out in the clear air the coil of his raw- 
hide "rope," the glitter of his silver bit, the metal 
points on his saddle skirts, the polish of his six- 
shooter, the gleam of his fish, all the details of his 
costume. Yet he was fully a mile distant. After a 
time he picked up his string of fish, mounted, and 
jogged loosely away at the cow-pony's little Spanish 
trot toward the south. Over a week later, having 
caught golden trout and climbed Mount Whitney, 
we followed him and so came to the great central 
camp at Monache Meadows. 

248 



ON COWBOYS 

Imagine an island-dotted lake of grass four or five 
miles long by two or three wide to which slope regu- 
lar shores of stony soil planted with trees. Imagine 
on the very edge of that lake an especially fine grove 
perhaps a quarter of a mile in length, beneath whose 
trees a dozen different outfits of cowboys are camped 
for the summer. You must place a herd of ponies 
in the foreground, a pine mountain at the back, an 
unbroken ridge across ahead, cattle dotted here and 
there, thousands of ravens wheeling and croaking 
and flapping everywhere, a marvelous clear sun and 
blue sky. The camps were mostly open, though a 
few possessed tents. They differed from the ordinary 
in that they had racks for saddles and equipments. 
Especially well laid out were the cooking arrange- 
ments. A dozen accommodating springs supplied 
fresh water with the conveniently regular spacing of 
faucets. 

Towards evening the men jingled in. This sum- 
mer camp was almost in the nature of a vacation to 
them after the hard work of the desert. All they had 
to do was to ride about the pleasant hills examining 
that the cattle did not stray nor get into trouble. It 
was fun for them, and they were in high spirits. 

Our immediate neighbors were an old man of 
seventy-two and his grandson of twenty-five. At 
least the old man said he was seventy-two. I should 
have guessed fifty. He was as straight as an arrow, 
wiry, lean, clear-eyed, and had, without food, ridden 

249 



THE MOUNTAINS 

twelve hours after some strayed cattle. On arriving 
he threw off his saddle, turned his horse loose, and 
set about the construction of supper. This consisted 
of boiled meat, strong tea, and an incredible number 
of flapjacks built of water, baking-powder, salt, and 
flour, warmed through — not cooked — in a frying- 
pan. He deluged these with molasses and devoured 
three platefuls. It would have killed an ostrich, but 
apparently did this decrepit veteran of seventy-two 
much good. 

After supper he talked to us most interestingly in 
the dry cowboy manner, looking at us keenly from 
under the floppy brim of his hat. He confided to us 
that he had had to quit smoking, and it ground him 
— he 'd smoked since he was five years old. 

" Tobacco does n't agree with you any more ? " I 
hazarded. 

" Oh, 't aint that," he replied ; " only I 'd ruther 
chew." 

The dark fell, and all the little camp-fires under the 
trees twinkled bravely forth. Some of the men sang. 
One had an accordion. Figures, indistinct and form- 
less, wandered here and there in the shadows, sud- 
denly emerging from mystery into the clarity of 
firelight, there to disclose themselves as visitors. Out 
on the plain the cattle lowed, the horses nickered. 
The red firelight flashed from the metal of suspended 
equipment, crimsoned the bronze of men's faces, 
touched with pink the high lights on their gracefully 

250 




Figures suddenly emerging from mystery into the clarity of firelight 



ON COWBOYS 

recumbent forms. After a while we rolled up in our 
blankets and went to sleep, while a band of coyotes 
wailed like lost spirits from a spot where a steer had 
died. 



25 1 



THE GOLDEN TROUT 



XX 

THE GOLDEN TROUT 

AFTER Farewell Gap, as has been hinted, the 
country changes utterly. Possibly that is why 
it is named Farewell Gap. The land is wild, weird, 
full of twisted trees, strangely colored rocks, fantastic 
formations, bleak mountains of slabs, volcanic cones, 
lava, dry powdery soil or loose shale, close-grow- 
ing grasses, and strong winds. You feel yourself in 
an upper world beyond the normal, where only the 
freakish cold things of nature, elsewhere crowded 
out, find a home. Camp is under a lonely tree, none 
the less solitary from the fact that it has companions. 
The earth beneath is characteristic of the treeless 
lands, so that these seem to have been stuck alien into 
it. There is no shelter save behind great fortuitous 
rocks. Huge marmots run over the boulders, like lit- 
tle bears. The wind blows strong. The streams run 
naked under the eye of the sun, exposing clear and 
yellow every detail of their bottoms. In them there 
are no deep hiding-places any more than there is 
shelter in the land, and so every fish that swims shows 
as plainly as in an aquarium. 

We saw them as we rode over the hot dry shale 
among the hot and twisted little trees. They lay 

255 



THE MOUNTAINS 

against the bottom, transparent; they darted away 
from the jar of our horses' hoofs ; they swam slowly 
against the current, delicate as liquid shadows, as 
though the clear uniform golden color of the bottom 
had clouded slightly to produce these tenuous ghostly 
forms. We examined them curiously from the ad- 
vantage our slightly elevated trail gave us, and knew 
them for the Golden Trout, and longed to catch 
some. 

All that day our route followed in general the 
windings of this unique home of a unique fish. We 
crossed a solid natural bridge ; we skirted fields of 
red and black lava, vivid as poppies ; we gazed mar- 
veling on perfect volcano cones, long since extinct ; 
finally we camped on a side hill under two tall 
branchless trees in about as bleak and exposed a 
position as one could imagine. Then all three, we 
jointed our rods and went forth to find out what 
the Golden Trout was like. 

I soon discovered a number of things, as follows : 
The stream at this point, near its source, is very nar- 
row — I could step across it — and flows beneath 
deep banks. The Golden Trout is shy of approach. 
The wind blows. Combining these items of know- 
ledge I found that it was no easy matter to cast forty 
feet in a high wind so accurately as to hit a three-foot 
stream a yard below the level of the ground. In fact, 
the proposition was distinctly sporty; I became as 
interested in it as in accurate target-shooting, so that 

256 



THE GOLDEN TROUT 

at last I forgot utterly the intention of my efforts and 
failed to strike my first rise. The second, however, 
I hooked, and in a moment had him on the grass. 

He was a little fellow of seven inches, but mere 
size was nothing, the color was the thing. And that 
was indeed golden. I can liken it to nothing more 
accurately than the twenty-dollar gold-piece, the 
same satin finish, the same pale yellow. The fish was 
fairly molten. It did not glitter in gaudy burnish- 
ment, as does our aquarium gold-fish, for example, 
but gleamed and melted and glowed as though fresh 
from the mould. One would almost expect that on 
cutting the flesh it would be found golden through 
all its substance. This for the basic color. You 
must remember always that it was a true trout, with- 
out scales, and so the more satiny. Furthermore, 
along either side of the belly ran two broad longi- 
tudinal stripes of exactly the color and burnish of the 
copper paint used on racing yachts. 

I thought then, and have ever since, that the 
Golden Trout, fresh from the water, is one of the 
most beautiful fish that swims. Unfortunately it 
fades very quickly, and so specimens in alcohol 
can give no idea of it. In fact, I doubt if you will 
ever be able to gain a very clear idea of it unless 
you take to the trail that leads up, under the end 
of which is known technically as the High Sierras. 

The Golden Trout lives only in this one stream, 
but occurs there in countless multitudes. Every little 

257 



THE MOUNTAINS 

pool, depression, or riffles has its school. When not 
alarmed they take the fly readily. One afternoon I 
caught an even hundred in a little over an hour. By 
way of parenthesis it may be well to state that most 
were returned unharmed to the water. They run 
small, — a twelve-inch fish is a monster, — but are 
of extraordinary delicacy for eating. We three de- 
voured sixty-five that first evening in camp. 

Now the following considerations seem to me at 
this point worthy of note. In the first place, the 
Golden Trout occurs but in this one stream, and is 
easily caught. At present the stream is compara- 
tively inaccessible, so that the natural supply prob- 
ably keeps even with the season's catches. Still the 
trail is on the direct route to Mount Whitney, and 
year by year the ascent of this " top of the Republic " 
is becoming more the proper thing to do. Every 
camping party stops for a try at the Golden Trout, 
and of course the fish-hog is a sure occasional migrant. 
The cowboys told of two who caught six hundred 
in a day. As the certainly increasing tide of summer 
immigration gains in volume, the Golden Trout, in 
spite of his extraordinary numbers at present, is going 
to be caught out. 

Therefore, it seems the manifest duty of the Fish- 
eries to provide for the proper protection and distri- 
bution of this species, especially the distribution. 
Hundreds of streams in the Sierras are without trout 
simply because of some natural obstruction, such as 

258 



THE GOLDEN TROUT 

a waterfall too high to jump, which prevents their 
ascent of the current. These are all well adapted to 
the planting of fish, and might just as well be stocked 
by the Golden Trout as by the customary Rainbow. 
Care should be taken lest the two species become 
hybridized, as has occurred following certain mis- 
guided efforts in the South Fork of the Kern. 

So far as I know but one attempt has been made 
to transplant these fish. About five or six years ago 
a man named Grant carried some in pails across to a 
small lake near at hand. They have done well, and 
curiously enough have grown to a weight of from one 
and a half to two pounds. This would seem to show 
that their small size in Volcano Creek results entirely 
from conditions of feed or opportunity for develop- 
ment, and that a study of proper environment might 
result in a game fish to rival the Rainbow in size and 
certainly to surpass him in curious interest. 

A great many well-meaning people who have 
marveled at the abundance of the Golden Trout 
in their natural habitat laugh at the idea that Vol- 
cano Creek will ever become " fished out." To such 
it should be pointed out that the fish in question is 
a voracious feeder, is without shelter, and quickly 
landed. A simple calculation will show how many 
fish a hundred moderate anglers, camping a week 
apiece, would take out in a season. And in a short 
time there will be many more than a hundred, few 
of them moderate, coming up into the mountains to 

259 



THE MOUNTAINS 

camp just as long as they have a good time. All it 
needs is better trails, and better trails are under way. 
Well-meaning people used to laugh at the idea that 
the buffalo and wild pigeons would ever disappear. 
They are gone. 



260 



ON GOING OUT 



XXI 
ON GOING OUT 

THE last few days of your stay in the wilderness 
you will be consumedly anxious to get out. 
It does not matter how much of a savage you are, 
how good a time you are having, or how long you 
have been away from civilization. Nor does it mean 
especially that you are glad to leave the wilds. 
Merely does it come about that you drift unconcern- 
edly on the stream of days until you approach the 
brink of departure: then irresistibly the current hur- 
ries you into haste. The last day of your week's 
vacation ; the last three of your month's or your 
summer's or your year's outing, — these comprise the 
hours in which by a mighty but invisible transforma- 
tion your mind forsakes its savagery, epitomizes 
again the courses of social evolution, regains the poise 
and cultivation of the world of men. Before that you 
have been content ; yes, and would have gone on 
being content for as long as you please until the ap- 
proach of the limit you have set for your wandering. 
In effect this transformation from the state of sav- 
agery to the state of civilization is very abrupt. 
When you leave the towns your clothes and mind 
are new. Only gradually do they take on the color 

263 



THE MOUNTAINS 

of their environment ; only gradually do the subtle 
influences of the great forest steal in on your dulled 
faculties to flow over them in a tide that rises imper- 
ceptibly. You glide as gently from the artificial to 
the natural life as do the forest shadows from night 
to day. But at the other end the affair is different. 
There you awake on the appointed morning in com- 
plete resumption of your old attitude of mind. The 
tide of nature has slipped away from you in the night. 
Then you arise and do the most wonderful of your 
wilderness traveling. On those days you look back 
fondly, of them you boast afterwards in telling what 
a rapid and enduring voyager you are. The biggest 
day's journey I ever undertook was in just such a 
case. We started at four in the morning through a 
forest of the early spring-time, where the trees were 
glorious overhead, but the walking ankle deep. On 
our backs were thirty-pound burdens. We walked 
steadily until three in the afternoon, by which time 
we had covered thirty miles and had arrived at what 
then represented civilization to us. Of the nine who 
started, two Indians finished an hour ahead ; the half 
breed, Billy, and I staggered in together, encouraging 
each other by words concerning the bottle of beer we 
were going to buy ; and the five white men never 
got in at all until after nine o'clock that night. 
Neither thirty miles, nor thirty pounds, nor ankle- 
deep slush sounds formidable when considered as 
abstract and separate propositions. 

264 



ON GOING OUT 

In your first glimpse of the civilized peoples your 
appearance in your own eyes will undergo the same 
instantaneous and tremendous revulsion that has al- 
ready taken place in your mental sphere. Heretofore 
you have considered yourself as a decently well ap- 
pointed gentleman of the woods. Ten to one, in con- 
trast to the voluntary or enforced simplicity of the 
professional woodsman you have looked on your 
little luxuries of carved leather hat-band, fancy knife 
sheath, pearl-handled six-shooter, or khaki breeches 
as giving you slightly the air of a forest exquisite. 
But on that depot platform or in presence of that 
staring group on the steps of the Pullman, you sud- 
denly discover yourself to be nothing less than a 
disgrace to your bringing up. Nothing could be more 
evident than the flop of your hat, the faded, dusty 
appearance of your blue shirt, the beautiful black 
polish of your khakis, the grime of your knuckles, the 
three days' beard of your face. If you are a fool, you 
worry about it. If you are a sensible man, you do not 
mind ; — and you prepare for amusing adventures. 

The realization of your external unworthiness, 
however, brings to your heart the desire for a hot 
bath in a porcelain tub. You gloat over the thought ; 
and when the dream comes to be a reality, you soak 
away in as voluptuous a pleasure as ever falls to the 
lot of man to enjoy. Then you shave, and array 
yourself minutely and preciously in clean clothes 
from head to toe, building up a new respectability, 

265 



THE MOUNTAINS 

and you leave scornfully in a heap your camping 
garments. They have heretofore seemed clean, but 
now you would not touch them, no, not even to put 
them in the soiled-clothes basket, let your feminines 
rave as they may. And for at least two days you 
prove an almost childish delight in mere raiment. 

But before you can reach this blissful stage you 
have still to order and enjoy your first civilized din- 
ner. It tastes good, not because your camp dinners 
have palled on you, but because your transformation 
demands its proper aliment. Fortunate indeed you 
are if you step directly to a transcontinental train or 
into the streets of a modern town. Otherwise the 
transition through the small-hotel provender is apt 
to offer too little contrast for the fullest enjoyment. 
But aboard the dining-car or in the cafe you will 
gather to yourself such ill-assorted succulence as thick, 
juicy beefsteaks, and creamed macaroni, and sweet 
potatoes, and pie, and red wine, and real cigars and 
other things. 

In their acquisition your appearance will tell 
against you. We were once watched anxiously by 
a nervous female head waiter who at last mustered 
up courage enough to inform me that guests were 
not allowed to eat without coats. We politely pointed 
out that we possessed no such garments. After a long 
consultation with the proprietor she told us it was all 
right for this time, but that we must not do it again. 
At another place I had to identify myself as a re- 

266 



ON GOING OUT 

sponsible person by showing a picture in a magazine 
bought for the purpose. 

The public never will know how to take you. 
Most of it treats you as though you were a two-dollar 
a day laborer ; some of the more astute are puzzled. 
One February I walked out of the North Country on 
snowshoes and stepped directly into a Canadian 
Pacific transcontinental train. I was clad in fur cap, 
vivid blanket coat, corded trousers, German stock- 
ings and moccasins ; and my only baggage was the 
pair of snowshoes. It was the season of light travel. 
A single Englishman touring the world as the crow 
flies occupied the car. He looked at me so askance 
that I made an opportunity of talking to him. I 
should like to read his " Travels " to see what he 
made out of the riddle. In similar circumstances, 
and without explanation, I had fun talking French 
and swapping boulevard reminiscences with a mem- 
ber of a Parisian theatrical troupe making a long 
jump through northern Wisconsin. And once, at 
six of the morning, letting myself into my own 
house with a latch-key, and sitting down to read the 
paper until the family awoke, I was nearly brained 
by the butler. He supposed me a belated burglar, 
and had armed himself with the poker. The most 
flattering experience of the kind was voiced by a 
small urchin who plucked at his mother's sleeve : 
" Look, mamma ! " he exclaimed in guarded but 
jubilant tones, " there 's a real Indian ! " 
267 



THE MOUNTAINS 

Our last camp of this summer was built and broken 
in the full leisure of at least a three weeks' expecta- 
tion. We had traveled south from the Golden Trout 
through the Toowah range. There we had viewed 
wonders which I cannot expect you to believe in, — 
such as a spring of warm water in which you could 
bathe and from which you could reach to dip up a 
cup of carbonated water on the right hand, or cast 
a fly into a trout stream, on the left. At length we 
entered a high meadow in the shape of a maltese 
cross, with pine slopes about it, and springs of water 
welling in little humps of green. There the long 
pine-needles were extraordinarily thick and the pine- 
cones exceptionally large. The former we scraped 
together to the depth of three feet for a bed in the 
lea of a fallen trunk ; the latter we gathered in arm- 
fuls to pile on the camp-fire. Next morning we rode 
down a mile or so through the grasses, exclaimed 
over the thousands of mountain quail buzzing from 
the creek bottoms, gazed leisurely up at our well- 
known pines and about at the grateful coolness of 
our accustomed green meadows and leaves ; — and 
then, as though we had crossed a threshold, we 
emerged into chaparral, dry loose shale, yucca, Span- 
ish bayonet, heated air and the bleached burned-out 
furnace-like country of arid California in midsummer. 
The trail dropped down through sage-brush, just as 
it always did in the California we had known ; the 
mountains rose with the fur-like dark-olive effect of 

268 



ON GOING OUT 

the coast ranges ; the sun beat hot. We had left the 
enchanted land. 

The trail was very steep and very long, and took 
us finally into the country of dry brown grasses, gray 
brush, waterless stony ravines, and dust. Others had 
traveled that trail, headed the other way, and evi- 
dently had not liked it. Empty bottles blazed the 
path. Somebody had sacrificed a pack of playing- 
cards, which he had stuck on thorns from time to 
time, each inscribed with a blasphemous comment 
on the discomforts of such travel. After an appar- 
ently interminable interval we crossed an irrigating 
ditch, where the horses were glad to water, and so 
came to one of those green flowering lush California 
villages so startlingly in contrast to their surround- 
ings. 

By this it was two o'clock and we had traveled 
on horseback since four. A variety of circumstances 
learned at the village made it imperative that both 
the Tenderfoot and myself should go out without 
the delay of a single hour. This left Wes to bring 
the horses home, which was tough on Wes, but he 
rose nobly to the occasion. 

When the dust of our rustling cleared, we found 
we had acquired a team of wild broncos, a buck- 
board, an elderly gentleman with a white goatee, 
two bottles of beer, some crackers and some cheese. 
With these we hoped to reach the railroad shortly 
after midnight. 

269 



THE MOUNTAINS 

The elevation was five thousand feet, the road 
dusty and hot, the country uninteresting in sage- 
brush and alkali and rattlesnakes and general dryness. 
Constantly we drove, checking off the landmarks 
in the good old fashion. Our driver had immi- 
grated from Maine the year before, and by some 
chance had drifted straight to the arid regions. He 
was vastly disgusted. At every particularly atrocious 
dust-hole or unlovely cactus strip he spat into space 
and remarked in tones of bottomless contempt : — 

" ^a-ti-ful Cal-if-or-nia ! " 

This was evidently intended as a quotation. 

Towards sunset we ran up into rounded hills, 
where we got out at every rise in order to ease the 
horses, and where we hurried the old gentleman be- 
yond the limits of his Easterner's caution at every 
descent. 

It grew dark. Dimly the road showed gray in the 
twilight. We did not know how far exactly we were 
to go, but imagined that sooner or later we would 
top one of the small ridges to look across one of the 
broad plateau plains to the lights of our station. 
You see we had forgotten, in the midst of flatness, 
that we were still over five thousand feet up. Then 
the road felt its way between two hills ; — and the 
blackness of night opened below us as well as above, 
and from some deep and tremendous abyss breathed 
the winds of space. 

It was as dark as a cave, for the moon was yet two 
270 



ON GOING OUT 

hours below the horizon. Somehow the trail turned 
to the right along that tremendous cliff. We thought 
we could make out its direction, the dimness of its 
glimmering ; but equally well, after we had looked a 
moment, we could imagine it one way or another, to 
right and left. I went ahead to investigate. The trail 
to left proved to be the faint reflection of a clump of 
" old man " at least five hundred feet down ; that to 
right was a burned patch sheer against the rise of the 
cliff. We started on the middle way. 

There were turns-in where a continuance straight 
ahead would require an airship or a coroner ; again 
turns-out where the direct line would telescope you 
against the state of California. These we could make 
out by straining our eyes. The horses plunged and 
snorted ; the buckboard leaped. Fire flashed from 
the impact of steel against rock, momentarily blind- 
ing us to what we should see. Always we descended 
into the velvet blackness of the abyss, the canon 
walls rising steadily above us shutting out even the 
dim illumination of the stars. From time to time our 
driver, desperately scared, jerked out cheering bits of 
information. 

"My eyes ain't what they was. For the Lord's 
sake keep a-lookin', boys." 

"That nigh hoss is deef. There don't seem to be 
no use saying whoa to her." 

" Them brakes don't hold fer sour peanuts. I been 
figgerin' on tackin' on a new shoe for a week." 

271 



THE MOUNTAINS 

" I never was over this road but onct, and then I 
was headed th' other way. I was driving of a corpse." 

Then, after two hours of it, bing I bang I smash I 
our tongue collided with a sheer black wall, no 
blacker than the atmosphere before it. The trail here 
took a sharp V turn to the left. We had left the face 
of the precipice and henceforward would descend the 
bed of the canon. Fortunately our collision had done 
damage to nothing but our nerves, so we proceeded 
to do so. 

The walls of the crevice rose thousands of feet 
above us. They seemed to close together, like the 
sides of a tent, to leave only a narrow pale lucent 
strip of sky. The trail was quite invisible, and even 
the sense of its existence was lost when we traversed 
groves of trees. One of us had to run ahead of the 
horses, determining its general direction, locating the 
sharper turns. The rest depended on the instinct of 
the horses and pure luck. 

It was pleasant in the cool of night thus to run 
down through the blackness, shouting aloud to guide 
our followers, swinging to the slope, bathed to the 
soul in mysteries of which we had no time to take 
cognizance. 

By and by we saw a little spark far ahead of us 
like a star. The smell of fresh wood smoke and stale 
damp fire came to our nostrils. We gained the star 
and found it to be a log smouldering ; and up the 
hill other stars red as blood. So we knew that we 

272 



ON GOING OUT 

had crossed the zone of an almost extinct forest fire, 
and looked on the scattered camp-fires of an army 
of destruction. 

The moon rose. We knew it by touches of white 
light on peaks infinitely far above us ; not at all by 
the relieving of the heavy velvet blackness in which 
we moved. After a time, I, running ahead in my 
turn, became aware of the deep breathing of animals. 
I stopped short and called a warning. Immediately 
a voice answered me. 

" Come on, straight ahead. They 're not on the 
road." 

When within five feet I made out' the huge 
freight wagons in which were lying the teamsters, 
and very dimly the big freight mules standing teth- 
ered to the wheels. 

" It 's a dark night, friend, and you 're out late." 

"A dark night," I agreed, and plunged on. Be- 
hind me rattled and banged the abused buckboard, 
snorted the half-wild broncos, groaned the unre- 
paired brake, softly cursed my companions. 

Then at once the abrupt descent ceased. We 
glided out to the silvered flat, above which sailed the 
moon. 

The hour was seen to be half past one. We had 
missed our train. Nothing was visible of human 
habitations. The land was frosted with the moon- 
light, enchanted by it, etherealized. Behind us, huge 
and formidable, loomed the black mass of the range 

273 



THE MOUNTAINS 

we had descended. Before us, thin as smoke in the 
magic lucence that flooded the world, rose other 
mountains, very great, lofty as the sky. We could 
not understand them. The descent we had just ac- 
complished should have landed us on a level plain 
in which lay our town. But here we found ourselves 
in a pocket valley entirely surrounded by mountain 
ranges through which there seemed to be no pass less 
than five or six thousand feet in height. 

We reined in the horses to figure it out. 

" I don't see how it can be," said I. " We 've 
certainly come far enough. It would take us four 
hours at the very least to cross that range, even if 
the railroad should happen to be on the other side 
of it." 

" I been through here only once," repeated the 
driver, — " going the other way. — Then I drew a 
corpse." He spat, and added as an afterthought, 
" Beau-X\-M Cal-if-or-nia ! " 

We stared at the mountains that hemmed us in. 
They rose above us sheer and forbidding. In the 
bright moonlight plainly were to be descried the 
brush of the foothills, the timber, the fissures, the 
canons, the granites, and the everlasting snows. Al- 
most we thought to make out a thread of a water- 
fall high up where the clouds would be if the night 
had not been clear. 

" We got off the trail somewhere," hazarded the 
Tenderfoot. 

274 



ON GOING OUT 

" Well, we 're on a road, anyway," I pointed out. 
" It 's bound to go somewhere. We might as well 
give up the railroad and find a place to turn-in." 

" It can't be far," encouraged the Tenderfoot ; 
" this valley can't be more than a few miles across." 

" Gi dap ! " remarked the driver. 

We moved forward down the white wagon trail 
approaching the mountains. And then we were wit- 
nesses of the most marvelous transformation. For 
as we neared them, those impregnable mountains, 
as though panic-stricken by our advance, shrunk 
back, dissolved, dwindled, went to pieces. Where 
had towered ten-thousand-foot peaks, perfect in the 
regular succession from timber to snow, now were 
little flat hills on which grew tiny bushes of sage. A 
passage opened between them. In a hundred yards 
we had gained the open country, leaving behind us 
the mighty but unreal necromancies of the moon. 

Before us gleamed red and green lights. The mass 
of houses showed half distinguishable. A feeble 
glimmer illuminated part of a white sign above the 
depot. That which remained invisible was evidently 
the name of the town. That which was revealed was 
the supplementary information which the Southern 
Pacific furnishes to its patrons. It read : " Elevation 
482 feet." We were definitely out of the mountains. 



2 75 



THE LURE OF THE TRAIL 



XXII 
THE LURE OF THE TRAIL 

THE trail's call depends not at all on your com- 
mon sense. You know you are a fool for 
answering it; and yet you go. The comforts of 
civilization, to put the case on its lowest plane, are 
not lightly to be renounced : the ease of having your 
physical labor done for you; the joy of cultivated 
minds, of theatres, of books, of participation in the 
world's progress ; these you leave behind you. And 
in exchange you enter a life where there is much long 
hard work of the hands — work that is really hard and 
long, so that no man paid to labor would consider 
it for a moment; you undertake to eat simply, to 
endure much, to lie on the rack of anxiety ; you vol- 
untarily place yourself where cold, wet, hunger, thirst, 
heat, monotony, danger, and many discomforts will 
wait upon you daily. A thousand times in the course 
of a woods life even the stoutest-hearted will tell him- 
self softly — very softly if he is really stout-hearted, 
so that others may not be annoyed — that if ever the 
fates permit him to extricate himself he will never 
venture again. 

These times come when long continuance has 
worn on the spirit. You beat all day to windward 

279 



THE MOUNTAINS 

against the tide toward what should be but an hour's 
sail : the sea is high and the spray cold ; there are 
sunken rocks, and food there is none; chill gray- 
evening draws dangerously near, and there is a 
foot of water in the bilge. You have swallowed 
your tongue twenty times on the alkali ; and the 
sun is melting hot, and the dust dry and pervasive, 
and there is no water, and for all your effort the 
relative distances seem to remain the same for days. 
You have carried a pack until your every muscle 
is strung white-hot; the woods are breathless; the 
black flies swarm persistently and bite until your 
face is covered with blood. You have struggled 
through clogging snow until each time you raise 
your snowshoe you feel as though some one had 
stabbed a little sharp knife into your groin; it has 
come to be night; the mercury is away below zero, 
and with aching fingers you are to prepare a camp 
which is only an anticipation of many more such 
camps in the ensuing days. For a week it has 
rained, so that you, pushing through the dripping 
brush, are soaked and sodden and comfortless, and 
the bushes have become horrible to your shrink- 
ing goose-flesh. Or you are just plain tired out, not 
from a single day's fatigue, but from the gradual ex- 
haustion of a long hike. Then in your secret soul 
you utter these sentiments : — 

" You are a fool. This is not fun. There is no real 
reason why you should do this. If you ever get out 



THE LURE OF THE TRAIL 

of here, you will stick right home where common 
sense flourishes, my son ! " 

Then after a time you do get out, and are thank- 
ful. But in three months you will have proved in 
your own experience the following axiom — I should 
call it the widest truth the wilderness has to teach : — 

" In memory the pleasures of a camping trip 
strengthen with time, and the disagreeables weaken." 

I don't care how hard an experience you have had, 
nor how little of the pleasant has been mingled with 
it, in three months your general impression of that 
trip will be good. You will look back on the hard 
times with a certain fondness of recollection. 

I remember one trip I took in the early spring fol- 
lowing a long drive on the Pine River. It rained 
steadily for six days. We were soaked to the skin 
all the time, ate standing up in the driving down- 
pour, and slept wet. So cold was it that each morn- 
ing our blankets were so full of frost that they crackled 
stiffly when we turned out. Dispassionately I can 
appraise that as about the worst I ever got into. Yet 
as an impression the Pine River trip seems to me a 
most enjoyable one. 

So after you have been home for a little while the 
call begins to make itself heard. At first it is very 
gentle. But little by little a restlessness seizes hold 
of you. You do not know exactly what is the mat- 
ter : you are aware merely that your customary life 
has lost savor, that you are doing things more or less 



THE MOUNTAINS 

perfunctorily, and that you are a little more irritable 
than your naturally evil disposition. 

And gradually it is borne in on you exactly what 
is the matter. Then say you to yourself: — 

" My son, you know better. You are no tender- 
foot. You have had too long an experience to admit 
of any glamour of indefiniteness about this thing. 
No use bluffing. You know exactly how hard you 
will have to work, and how much tribulation you are 
going to get into, and how hungry and wet and cold 
and tired and generally frazzled out you are going to 
be. You 've been there enough times so it 's pretty 
clearly impressed on you. You go into this thing 
with your eyes open. You know what you 're in for. 
You're pretty well off right here, and you 'd be a fool 
to go." 

" That 's right," says yourself to you. " You 're dead 
right about it, old man. Do you know where we can 
get another pack-mule % " 



282 



L£Ag'Q3 



